Arlo Parks released her second album, My Soft Machine, today. It’s the follow-up to her widely acclaimed 2021 debut album, Collapsed in Sunbeams. There is definitely no sophomore slump going on here. The album is full of rich textured mellow beats. I feel like she’s doing something completely different than other artists are doing right now, and I’m here for it. It’s hard to believe that she is only 22 years old.

I’m very much hoping that whenever she has a North American tour to support this album that I’ll be able to see her. Right now she’s touring Europe and Australia and has no North American dates, but presumably they’ll come in the fall. Fingers crossed.

I feel like I’m doing you a bit of a disservice by sharing the song “Devotion” because sonically it’s an outlier and not very representative of the sounds on the rest of the album, but it’s also my favorite song on the album so I’m going with it for better or worse. Listen to it and then go dig into the rest of the album and see what else she has to offer.