Arlo Parks Review

On a Monday night in North Park, with the Gaslamp crowds thinning and University Avenue settling into its midweek quiet, Arlo Parks made a modest room feel like the safest place in the city.

The British singer-songwriter brought her Desire Tour to the Observatory North Park on Monday, a stop sandwiched between two nights that better reflect her rising profile. An intimate set at Pappy & Harriet's in Pioneertown on Tuesday, and a much larger gig on Friday at The Bellwether in Los Angeles. The show unfortunately did not sell out; the balcony stayed dark and patches of floor remained open near the soundboard. Those who came, though, came close to the stage, and Parks rewarded them with 80 minutes of music that treated heartbreak like something to be held, not healed.

The tour supports Ambiguous Desire, Parks' third album, released earlier this year as the follow up to 2023's My Soft Machine. Where her Mercury Prize-winning debut Collapsed in Sunbeams whispered its way through depression and young love, the new record literally moves you. Parks has said she "danced more than ever" making it, and Monday's set followed her from the queer hedonism of New York's Paradise Garage to the nocturnal British pulse of the Streets and Burial.

She opened with "Heaven," the album's glimmering lead single, and the band—noticably tight, nimble, and unshowy—locked into a groove that never really let go across the night. "Jetta" and "Blades" from the new record landed with more force live than on wax, the synth catharsis of the latter filling the room's high ceiling. "2SIDED," the other preview single from Ambiguous Desire, arrived mid-set with a house-rooted bounce that got the front rows swaying in the way San Diego crowds do: earnestly, a little self-consciously, entirely sincerely.

The emotional spine of the night, though, remained the old material. "Eugene," with its devastating jealousy dressed up as a lullaby, drew the loudest singalong of the evening. "Weightless" floated. And "Black Dog"—her 2020 meditation on a friend's depression—silenced the room completely, hundreds of voices whispering "it's so cruel, what your mind can do for no reason" back at her like a shared incantation. This is Parks' gift: the darkest subject matter rendered as the coziest of songs.

The encore stitched together her earliest work. "Super Sad Generation," "Cola," "Sophie" and "Second Guessing" flowing into one another, a survey of the EPs that made her the BBC's Sound of 2020 pick before she'd turned 20.

Parks, 26 and a UNICEF ambassador now, remains a performer of unusual openness; candid between songs in a way that makes an arena career seem beside the point. "Thank you for being here on a Monday," she told the crowd near the end. "This means everything."

It wasn't a sellout. It was better than that. It was the kind of show people will claim they saw, years from now, when she's playing rooms three times this size. Catch her while the rooms are still small.