Twice Grammy-nominated Mercury Prize and BRIT Award-winning Blood alumni Arlo Parks brings her new album ‘My Soft Machine’ to blue and black splatter LP, limited to 1,000 copies and hand-numbered to order.
My Soft Machine is a deeply personal body of work, a narration of Parks experiences as she navigates her 20’s and the growth intertwined.
“The world/our view of it is peppered by the biggest things we experience - our traumas, upbringing, vulnerabilities almost like visual snow,” Arlo said. “This record is life through my lens, through my body - the mid 20s anxiety, the substance abuse of friends around me, the viscera of being in love for the first time, navigating PTSD and grief and self sabotage and joy, moving through worlds with wonder and sensitivity - what it’s like to be trapped in this particular body."
“There is a quote from a Joanna Hogg film called the Souvenir, it’s an A24 semi-autobiographical film with Tilda Swinton - it recounts a young film student falling in love with an older, charismatic man as a young film student then being drawn into his addiction - in an early scene he’s explaining why people watch films - “we don’t want to see life as it is played out we want to see life as it is experienced in this soft machine.”
The record follows Arlo’s critically-acclaimed and award-winning debut Collapsed in Sunbeams; a record which received two Grammy nominations for Best New Artist and Best Alternative Music Album, won the BRIT Award for Best New Artist, received the Hyundai Mercury Prize, and won the BBC Introducing Artist Of The Year Award. Her debut album also reached the top 3 on the UK Album Charts and won the AIM Awards for Best Independent Album and UK Independent Breakthrough.
On top of all this, Arlo was also nominated for Breakthrough International Act at the BET Awards, was named as the youngest ever high-profile supporter of UNICEF and an ambassador for the British mental health charity, CALM. She has plans to continue her extensive work with both charities into 2023.
