Twice Grammy-nominated, Mercury Prize and BRIT Award-winning artist Arlo Parks has today announced details of her brand-new My Soft Machine UK & European tour, which begins with a show in Dublin’s 3Olympia Theatre on 5th September 2023. The news of the tour comes alongside the announcement of the upcoming release of her long awaited second album, My Soft Machine, due 26th May on Transgressive Records, and the album’s first single ‘Weightless’.
Tickets from €29.95 including booking fees on sale Friday 3rd February at 10AM
On the single, Parks expresses “Weightless surrounds the painful experience of caring deeply about someone who only gives you tiny breadcrumbs of affection. It’s about suddenly realising that a person has dulled your edges and embarking on the slow journey back to being a brighter version of yourself.”
My Soft Machine is a deeply personal body of work; a narration of Parks’ experiences as she navigates her 20’s and the growth intertwined.
“The world/our view of it is peppered by the biggest things we experience – our traumas, upbringing, vulnerabilities almost like visual snow. This record is life through my lens, through my body – the mid 20s anxiety, the substance abuse of friends around me, the viscera of being in love for the first time, navigating PTSD and grief and self sabotage and joy, moving through worlds with wonder and sensitivity – what it’s like to be trapped in this particular body. There is a quote from a Joanna Hogg film called the Souvenir, it’s an A24 semi-autobiographical film with Tilda Swinton – it recounts a young film student falling in love with an older, charismatic man as a young film student then being drawn into his addiction – in an early scene he’s explaining why people watch films – “we don’t want to see life as it is played out we want to see life as it is experienced in this soft machine.” So there we have it, the record is called….My Soft Machine.” – Arlo Parks
My Soft Machine will be the follow-up to Arlo’s critically-acclaimed and award-winning debut Collapsed in Sunbeams; a record which received two Grammy nominations for Best New Artist and Best Alternative Music Album, won the BRIT Award for Best New Artist, received the Hyundai Mercury Prize, and won the BBC Introducing Artist Of The Year Award. Her debut album also reached the top 3 on the UK Album Charts and won the AIM Awards for Best Independent Album and UK Independent Breakthrough. On top of all this, Arlo was also nominated for Breakthrough International Act at the BET Awards, was named as the youngest ever high-profile supporter of UNICEF and an ambassador for the British mental health charity, CALM. She has plans to continue her extensive work with both charities into 2023.
Along with the towering awards garnered last year, Arlo’s debut album was included on almost every ‘Best Albums of 2021’ list and received critical acclaim from the likes of The Guardian, Rolling Stone, NME, The FADER and many more. Arlo performed singles from her debut album on Later…With Jools Holland and The Graham Norton Show in the UK. She also performed on Jimmy Kimmel, Jimmy Fallon, James Corden, CBS This Morning: Saturday, and Ellen DeGeneres in the US.