Sweating under the strobes at Midnight Lovers in LA, dancing to the bass beneath the K Bridge in Greenpoint, finding new faces at Venue MOT in London – these are the dark, enveloping spaces giving life to Arlo Parks’ powerful third album, Ambiguous Desire.

“I fell in love with nocturnal spaces over the past two years of writing this album,” Parks says. “These were places where I could be whoever I wanted to be on that night, from staying on the fringes to throwing myself into it completely and escaping for hours on the dancefloor. It was so playful, being able to lose yourself and then reemerge into the world. Every time I came out into the daylight, I felt so inspired.”

The result is 12 tracks of the British singer-songwriter’s most vulnerable, self-affirming and euphoric music to date. Songs like “Get Go” play through pirate radio breakbeats as Parks employs her signature lyricism to recount a tale of someone surrendering to the thrill of the night, while “Beams” builds shimmering chords over tender lyrics on healing from a damaging former love and “Senses” features one of Parks’ friends and musical inspirations, South London’s Sampha, in an introspective and soulful examination of destructive relationships. “He’s created an entire sound of his own, which has been so influential,” she says. “I wrote him a letter about the song and he held it so gently and completely understood what I was trying to say.” “Floette” meanwhile blossoms into a soaring melody of queer bliss, “Heaven” hammers through a cathartic, earth-shaking bass frequency and “Nightswimming” plays a UK Garage two-stepping rhythm under Parks’ luscious harmonies that recount the comfort of falling in love.

Referencing everything from the queer hedonism of legendary NYC DJ Larry Levan’s Paradise Garage club to the moody nocturnal British beats of The Streets and Burial, the glittering synth catharsis of LCD Soundsystem and rooted house grooves of Theo Parrish, Ambiguous Desire is 25-year-old Parks at her most confident and experimental.

“I feel most myself in my body when I’m dancing and being in those expressive spaces gave me the confidence to explore the artists that I’ve loved forever but haven’t been able to showcase in my music before,” she says. “The record is me learning to have more fun – embracing the light as well as the shade.”

Bursting onto the scene with her distinct blend of raw lyrical self-expression and vivid vocal melody on 2019’s debut EP Super Sad Generation, London-born Parks has since won the Mercury Music Prize for her 2021 Gold-certified debut album Collapsed in Sunbeams, been named a Breakthrough Artist at the 2021 Brit Awards, and been nominated at the Grammy Awards and Ivor Novello Awards. She has performed at Glastonbury and Coachella, opened for Billie Eilish and Harry Styles and headlined a global tour in support of 2023’s UK Top 10 and Brit-nominated follow-up album My Soft Machine. A poet as much as a performer, Parks also published her debut book, The Magic Border in 2023 and was a featured writer on Beyoncé’s Grammy-winning Cowboy Carter.