Arlo Parks has returned with her first single of the year. ‘Softy’ arrives today alongside an accompanying video directed by Zhang and Knight. Check it out below.
“‘Softly’ is a song about yearning, about how fragile you feel in the dying days of a relationship when you’re still desperately in love,” Parks explained in a press release. “The song is about how it feels to brace yourself before the blow of a break up and reminisce about the days where it all felt luminous.”
“For us ‘Softly’ explored the idea of wanting something that was once perfect to end in a gentle way, and we wanted to express this using the world surrounding Arlo,” Zhang and Knight said of the video. “We were instinctively drawn to the warm toned, hazy nostalgia of the 1960’s, as we loved the idea of something universally romantic being slowly stripped away throughout the film. We based the colors of the bricks, trims and doors on mid-century painting in order to bake this romanticism into everything. The production itself was a huge challenge, as everything was captured in-camera with each piece of the set built on wheels operated by several production crew. However, we knew it was all worth it when we saw the skyscrapers dancing around Arlo for the first time.”
Arlo Parks’ debut LP, Collapsed in Sunbeams, arrived last year and landed on our 50 Best Albums of 2021 list. The London singer-songwriter is up for Best New Artist and Best Alternative Music Album at the 2022 Grammys.
