With an alchemist’s touch, indie-pop singer-songwriter Arlo Parks transforms deep sadness into arresting beauty, proving herself a potent voice for Gen Z before even hitting 20. Born Anaïs Oluwatoyin Estelle Marinho in 2000, in Hammersmith, West London, Parks grew up obsessing over artists of all stripes, including Erykah Badu, Nick Drake, Radiohead, and King Krule (who inspired the “Arlo” in her alias). When she wasn’t listening to music, she was soaking up the words of poets like Sylvia Plath and Allen Ginsberg. The Apple Music Up Next artist stirs together all of these influences into a potent brew of spoken word, bedroom pop, indie folk, and alt-R&B that mirrors the fragility of life at any given moment. This was already evident on her 2018 debut single, “Cola,” a self-produced, self-recorded lo-fi seedling for what would blossom into the velvety, thoughtfully sculpted snapshots of her life that elegantly unfold across 2021’s Collapsed In Sunbeams and 2023’s My Soft Machine. As she told Apple Music, “The way that I write is about taking the mundane—all the little things, all the little moments—and kind of transforming it into a more beautiful whole.”