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Jan 18, 2023 By Mark Redfern Photography by Alexandra Waespi

London-based singer Arlo Parks has announced a new album, My Soft Machine, and shared its first single, “Weightless,” via a music video. The album features Phoebe Bridgers on one song. Parks has also announced some European tour dates. My Soft Machine is due out May 28 via Transgressive. Marc Oller directed the “Weightless” video. Watch it below followed by the album’s tracklist and cover art, as well as the tour dates.

My Soft Machine is the follow-up to Parks’ acclaimed debut album, Collapsed in Sunbeams, released in January 2021 via Transgressive. The album won the Mercury Prize for the best British album of the year and landed high on our Top 100 Albums of 2021 list.

Parks had this to say about the new song in a press release: “‘Weightless’ surrounds the painful experience of caring deeply about someone who only gives you tiny breadcrumbs of affection. It’s about suddenly realising that a person has dulled your edges and embarking on the slow journey back to being a brighter version of yourself.”

Of the new album and its title, Parks says: The world/our view of it is peppered by the biggest things we experience—our traumas, upbringing, vulnerabilities almost like visual snow. 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 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.’ So there we have it… My Soft Machine.”

Read our review of Collapsed in Sunbeams here.

Read our interview with Parks about the album here.

My Soft Machine Tracklist:

01 Bruiseless
02 Impurities
03 Devotion
04 Blades
05 Purple Phase
06 Weightless
07 Pegasus [ft. Phoebe Bridgers]
08 Dog Rose
09 Puppy
10 I’m Sorry
11 Room (Red Wings)
12 Ghost

Arlo Parks Tour Dates:

9/5 - Dublin, Ireland @ 3Olympia Theatre
9/14 - Amsterdam, Netherlands @ Paradiso
9/15 - Brussels, Belgium @ Ancienne Belgique
9/17 - Berlin, Germany @ Huxleys Neue Welt
9/19 - Milan, Italy @ Alcatraz
9/21 - Paris, France @ L’Olympia
9/28 - London, UK @ Eventim Apollo

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