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The young Londoner’s confessional brand of pop is fast becoming the sound of emo 2.0
Arlo Parks has carved out a niche in committing to music the joyous highs and crushing lows of the emotional rollercoaster that is adolescence. With crushes and comedowns her themes, the west Londoner (raised in Hammersmith) makes confessional, coming-of-age bedroom pop, but says her inspirations range from Allen Ginsberg and Sylvia Plath to Jim Morrison and Fela Kuti.
Making music is how Parks, 19, grew to understand her own identity. She is, in her words, “a black kid who can’t dance for shit, listens to emo music and currently has a crush on some girl in my Spanish class”. She started writing poetry at school as a way of exploring her bisexuality, and then began to turn her poems into songs. By 18, she’d already written and self-produced an album’s worth of material. With her own teenage years drawing to a close, she tries to make sense of her anxieties with frankly titled songs like Super Sad Generation (“Yesterday I heard you say/ ‘Everything will sort itself if I get to LA’”) and Romantic Garbage (“If I fell in love with you, would you bring me the moon? Or some broken beer bottles and fresh war wounds?”). Continue reading...