Arlo Parks offers another alluring slice of electronica-forward, bass-heavy pop on “Heaven,” the second single to emerge from her April 3 album Ambiguous Desire. The song was inspired by watching friend Kelly Lee Owens DJ a pop-up show with Caribou under the Sixth Street Viaduct in Los Angeles in November 2024.
“Adidas and gasoline / my friends spilling out into the street / let’s get involved / until the dawn breaks,” she coos on one of several new songs tailor-made to be born again in the hands of a skilled remixer.
Parks tells SPIN she feels “Heaven” could be considered “the heart of or the embodiment of the record in so many different fronts. The confidence. The storytelling in a way that blended slightly more journalistic musing in the second verse, and then the first verse being like, I was there with Kelly watching her DJ, the green light, the silver light, the Diet Coke. It’s that hyper-specific blended with the more pensive or philosophizing part of it.”
“That second verse is one of my favorites that I wrote on the record, because again, it’s about being present,” she continues. “I think sometimes when I’m at the peak of having the most wonderful time and I’m just in it, I’m like, I wish I could feel like this all the time. And then, that spoils my enjoyment of the moment [with] this awareness of the ending. Maybe knowing that I can have this feeling and let it go is what will actually let me lose myself in this moment. That was me also just trying to reckon with my own relationship to time and finality.”
When crafting “Heaven,” Parks and Ambiguous Desire Baird were particularly inspired by Caribou and Jamie xx’s contributions to Radiohead’s King of Limbs remix album TKOL RMX 1234567, which they blended with “piano more in the vein of Duval Timothy or Sampha — with the cascading, slightly more experimental thing. And then my voice, of course,” Parks says. “It was bringing the warmth into that music and some kind of softness with these beats. I liked that sonically I was able to collage together all these parts, where each one still felt as true as the next.”
Parks will celebrate the release of Ambiguous Desire with a series of U.K. record store performances, beginning April 2 in London and concluding April 12 in Southampton. The artist also contributed a non-album track, “Nothing I Could Hide,” to the upcoming War Child benefit album HELP(2), which will be released March 6.
