Arlo Parks is still a little dazed by the pace of her rise. “I’m still a little overwhelmed by everything that’s happening—but in the best way,” she says. “I didn’t expect any of this, so I’m just enjoying the ride.” That ride produced Collapsed in Sunbeams, a debut album full of pastel nostalgia, blunt specificity, and the kind of hope that doesn’t pretend everything’s fine, just that it might be someday.
Hope, the album’s latest single, became the accidental thesis. “I wrote the album song by song, just instinct and intuition,” Parks says. “But afterward I realized hope was at the core—light at the end of the tunnel. Pain either changes or ends.” She’s not writing manifestos for the masses so much as mantras for herself—or maybe for one friend who needs to hear them. “A lot of the choruses are like little mantras I tell myself,” she says.
It tracks that Parks came to music through poetry. Short stories at seven became poems in her teens, then lyrics. “With poems, I could ramble for pages,” she says. “With songs, you’ve got to fit the whole story in a few lines.” She’ll hear a chord progression and match it to a poem, pulling out phrases and “beating it into shape.” Spotify listeners can watch the process unfold: every track on Collapsed in Sunbeams is paired with a poem in its Stories. “They’re part of longer poems that contained at least one of the phrases I later used in the songs,” she says.
Her writing thrives on hyper-specific detail—references to Twin Peaks, amethysts, and Radiohead—that somehow become universal. “When I wrote ‘Eugene,’ I thought no one would understand what I was talking about. But it ended up being the song people said they felt represented by.” She refuses to sand off the edges to chase broader appeal: “Platitudes can be kind of empty. If it’s too specific? I still enjoyed writing it.”
Radiohead turns up more than once in her world. In Rainbows is her favorite, but it’s her stripped-back piano cover of “Creep” that reframes the band’s most begrudging hit. “There’s something beautiful in those lyrics,” she says. “I wanted to strip it down so the story is at the forefront.” The result makes “I don’t belong here” feel less like grunge-era angst and more like an imposter-syndrome confession—exactly the kind of self-examination that runs through Collapsed in Sunbeams.
Sonically, the record owes a debt to the ’90s—TLC, Elliott Smith, trip hop, Portishead, Massive Attack—and especially the decade’s drum sounds. “I was taking references from hip-hop, from trip hop, basically everywhere, until I got it right,” she says. The palette is warm and sunset-hued, but Parks doesn’t wallow in nostalgia. “It’s about balance—being aware of the past without living there.”
She’s conversational in French and hopes to write lyrics in the language someday. For now, she’s focused on the uncertain business of touring. There are dates penciled in for the U.S., UK, and Europe, and a few festival hopes. “It’s all a waiting game,” she says. “But I know I’ll get to do it eventually.”
Until then, Parks is content to keep writing—half pep talks, half diary entries—and to leave the light on for whoever might need to find it.
Watch the interview above and then check out the videos below.
