Arlo Parks made her name by articulating hurt with the precision of a therapist. On “2SIDED”, she wilfully abandons that clarity. The song doesn’t want you to understand it.
It wants you to stay confused alongside it, head cloudy, asking someone you barely know to confirm they feel what you feel, knowing they probably won’t answer straight.
This is Parks in a fundamentally different mode. Her previous albums, Collapsed in Sunbeams (2021) and My Soft Machine (2023), built their intimacy through live instrumentation and careful observation.
2SIDED lives entirely in the body, not the mind. Recorded in producer Baird’s downtown New York loft and shaped by the city’s juke nights, the track swaps acoustic textures for drum machines and synths.
The production, handled by Baird and Rob Bisel, feels deliberately synthetic, almost cheap in its retro warmth.
Parks’ voice glides over it all without friction, smooth to the point of detachment.
The key lyric isn’t “tell me it’s two-sided,” though that’s the obvious hook. It’s “my friends are all inside.”
She’s chosen to stand outside with someone who makes her head cloudy, abandoning her community for the possibility of reciprocation.
It’s a small choice that reveals everything about the song’s stakes: this isn’t grand romantic drama, it’s the minor cruelty of wanting someone to want you back while the party continues without you.
The repetition of “my head is so clouded” isn’t poetic. It’s literal. She doesn’t know what she’s doing. She’s doing it anyway.
The word “two-sided” itself feels telling: not mutual, not reciprocal, but a coin flip. A fifty-fifty chance. The language of gambling rather than certainty.
“I danced more than ever as I made this record,” Parks explains. “I made more friends than ever too, found myself in the weird underbelly of New York juke nights, unleashed, laughed and laughed and laughed.”
That shift from introspection to immersion, from London bedrooms to New York dancefloors, rewired the music itself.
The track progresses the subtle trip hop of My Soft Machine into synth-driven pop that prioritises movement over meditation.
The drum machine keeps distance. The synths blur edges. Parks’ voice stays controlled even as the lyrics describe losing control. The production refuses intimacy but somehow makes you move anyway.
What Parks isn’t doing anymore is offering comfort. 2SIDED offers no reassurance.
It stays trapped in the moment before the other person responds, suspended in terrible hope. The heat and the dark. The clouded mind. The question hanging there.
This is the first glimpse of Ambiguous Desire, Parks’ third album arriving 3rd April, and the title feels deliberately chosen.
Not complicated desire or conflicted desire, but ambiguous: desire that refuses clear meaning, that won’t resolve into a lesson or a lyric you can post. “This record has desire at its center,” Parks says.
“Desire is a life force, it’s a wanting, a yearning, a momentum. We are all alive because there is something or someone we want. Desire is an engine. But it is also mysterious, tangled, random, enlightening and HUMAN.”
The video locks Parks into the dense intimacy of a dancefloor, bodies pressing close, lights cutting through smoke.
She moves through the space with purpose but no destination, looking for someone who might be looking back.
It’s less music video than documentation of a feeling that only exists in rooms like this, after midnight, when wanting someone becomes the only thought that matters.
2SIDED commits to the cloudiness rather than trying to see through it. Parks isn’t asking for advice or working towards acceptance.
She’s asking a direct question and refusing to imagine the answer. That refusal, to explain, to resolve, to grow, might be the bravest thing she’s done yet.
The song ends where it begins, still clouded, still asking. Parks has spent her career making sense of pain. Now she’s interested in what happens when you stop making sense.
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