Arlo Parks names the records that still move her
From Eurythmics' first jolt to Portishead's tears, the Mercury Prize winner lays out her ear — with Ambiguous Desire already in the world.
Arlo Parks has shared an honest playlist of the songs that sit behind her own writing, naming the first record she fell in love with and those that still catch her unprepared.
She pointed to Eurythmics' Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This) as that first love. She said she plays Lady Gaga shamelessly in the car, and that Portishead can reduce her to tears. She also described a careful approach to one particular song — a detail that fits a songwriter whose public work has always favoured patience over force.
A run built on close attention
Parks, the English singer and songwriter born Anaïs Oluwatoyin Estelle Marinho, broke through with Collapsed in Sunbeams in 2021. The debut climbed to number three on the UK Albums Chart. It brought Brit Award nominations for Album of the Year, Best New Artist and Best British Female Solo Artist, and it won the Mercury Prize. Those twelve months fixed her place in the British songwriting conversation and set a standard her later records have had to meet.
The path to that debut was already visible. Singles and EPs across 2018 and 2019 — among them Cola, Angel's Song, Romantic Garbage, Sophie and Super Sad Generation — sketched the tone before the album arrived. My Soft Machine followed in 2023. In 2026 came Ambiguous Desire, her latest studio album, with further DJ-mix projects the same year showing an ear still roaming beyond her own catalogue. For a writer kept on heavy rotation here, the line from the early EPs to the Mercury win and on to this year's album is the frame in which a playlist of influences makes sense.
What she chooses to name does not rewrite that run. It does show the grain of the taste that fed it. Annie Lennox and Dave Stewart's early-1980s hit is a pop landmark; Parks claiming it as a first love places her listening in a lineage broader than any single scene tag. Portishead, the English trip-hop band from Bristol, supply another pole — music she says can still bring her to tears. Lady Gaga, played loud and without apology, adds pop as pure release. The three points do not form a neat triangle. They suggest a listener willing to hold glamour, weight and uplift in the same week.
Craft before launch
There is no accompanying single. The value sits elsewhere: in hearing how a Mercury Prize winner still talks about songs as things that happen to her — the first jolt, the car-stereo grin, the sudden tears — rather than as content to be managed.
Her careful handling of one track, unnamed beyond the fact of that care, underlines the point. Parks has built a reputation on not rushing a feeling. Extending that reserve to a song she loves fits with the catalogues already behind her. Listeners who know Collapsed in Sunbeams and My Soft Machine will recognise the temperament; those arriving through the 2026 album will find the same thread running back to the 2019 EPs.
Eurythmics, Portishead and a shameless Lady Gaga chorus are not a press-release lineage. They are working references from a writer who has now carried a debut, a Mercury Prize, a second album and a third into public view without turning every appearance into a launch. The list leaves Parks where she stood this morning: a proven songwriter with Ambiguous Desire already in the world, still willing to say which records undo her.