The singer-songwriter Arlo Parks, born Anaïs Oluwatoyin Estelle Marinho, was raised in London and now lives in LA. Her debut studio album, Collapsed in Sunbeams, was released in January 2021 to critical acclaim. That year she won the breakthrough artist award at the Brits and, aged just 21, the Mercury prize for best album. She has written for Beyoncé, opened for Billie Eilish and Harry Styles, and, in 2023, published her debut collection of poetry, The Magic Border. Her third album, Ambiguous Desire, is out on 3 April and she plays a series of intimate UK record store shows to celebrate its release.

Orphée (dir. Jean Cocteau)

I love this French film from the 50s, a variation on the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice; it’s very emotional and beautiful and also very existential. Jean Cocteau was associated with surrealism and it has all these themes of mirrors, mortality and portals – it’s incredible. I went through a period of being really inquisitive about surrealist work in general. I watched a lot of Robert Altman and David Lynch, and Cocteau seemed like an influence on those sorts of experimental films. I also love the fact that Cocteau was a painter and a poet. I've always been drawn to artists that have a polymath practice.


Rosalía: Lux

I put this album on for the first time when I was driving alone in LA, and I just started balling. There’s something so magical about it. There aren’t many big global stars that experiment in such a true way – it's a record that only Rosalía could make. She recorded it with the London Symphony Orchestra, collaborated with many different artists, sings in many different languages and explores different pockets of her own spirituality and what it means to be a woman. It's such a fearless record. I saw her recent Brits performance too, collaborating with Björk, the mother of the weird and the wonderful, and it feels like Björk’s almost passing on the torch.  The choreography was done by La(Horde), an experimental dance company from Marseilles; the movement, the rave-orchestral blend, was just so good.

Little Duck the Picklery, London E8

I'm a massive foodie. I think because I travel so much,
I find a sense of home in discovering restaurants as I go to different parts of the world, but this is one of my favourites. It's this little restaurant and wine bar, with natural wines and ferments, in Dalston and it's my go-to. Before I moved to LA, I took my mum there – I was showing her all my favourite parts of east London. I love the fact that it has a seasonal menu and it feels really cosy. Memorable dishes include an amazing radicchio, ricotta and orange salad, some ravioli, and a lovely sorbet. My partner and I are very pickles-obsessed. My dad has had an allotment since I was a kid
and I remember on Sunday mornings there would often be the smell of vinegar filling the kitchen and I was like: “OK, he's back at his pickling again”. I'm also a big fan of pretty funky orange wines and one of my favourite things to do at this restaurant is to ask what's the weirdest orange wine you have?

Willy Chavarria autumn/winter 2026 collection show, Paris

This was amazing – it felt more like a theatre performance or an immersive, live film experience than a fashion show. There were about five different musical performers, so many changes of scenery and then a slow-motion kind of fight scene at the end. Willy Chavarria is a fashion designer based in New York and this recent show in Paris felt so tied to his roots – Chicano culture, Mexican culture, New York culture. He put a real effort into the storytelling. I really like wearing his clothes – he has a classic kind of drop-shoulder T-shirt and I have about 15 of those. He has a lot of oversized, boxier silhouettes, a lot of amazing workwear. It's a very kind of androgynous, oversized style but still feels quite chic.

The Critic as Artist by Oscar Wilde

I had been talking to my friend Lucy, who's a musician, and she mentioned a piece that Oscar Wilde wrote called De Profundis, and also The Critic as Artist. Then when I was in New York at McNally Jackson Books recently, The Critic as Artist was the first thing that caught my eye on a shelf. It felt fated. It's set up as a kind of conversation [between two characters, Ernest and Gilbert] about the difference between fine art and criticism and it lays out Wilde’s principles and aesthetic philosophies. I love Oscar Wilde's meandering, flowery language and it felt interesting, being an artist who is about to put something out into the world which is about to be critiqued, to understand that from a different perspective.

Interview by Imogen Carter

Ambiguous Desire is out on 3 April on Transgressive; details of Arlo Parks’s live dates can be found here