What she discovered, with close friends and heartbroken strangers, was a sort of hyperreality. Every facet of life – joy, despair and everything in between – co-existed under the strobe lights.
“Everyone’s guard is down, and everyone’s equally vulnerable. There’s all these little snippets of conversation and fleeting, really intense, connections.”
Those vignettes became source material for her new music. A poet before she was a songwriter, Parks has a knack for dropping you into stories that feel instantly familiar.
On the captivating, glitchy club track Heaven, external, she transports us to a gig by Kelly Lee Owens, under the 6th Street Viaduct bridge in Los Angeles, where “bodies in the summer breeze” are surrounded by concrete and the smell of gasoline.
In the confusion and the noise, she’s trying to locate her friend.
“And she was like, ‘Look down. I’m wearing the pink Adidas’,” recalls Parks. That tiny detail slips into the lyrics, bringing the song to life.
Get Go, external is a homage to London, with snatches of pirate radio and a crisp two-step beat, articulating a story about the therapeutic feeling of dancing with strangers.
It was inspired by “a friend of mine who’d just broken up with her boyfriend,” she explains.
“I was like, ‘Let’s just go dancing. Let’s be flooded with loud music, and you can cry, and we can just release this.'”
Blue Disco shifts focus to an afterparty at Park’s house, where someone’s cousin has thrown up and “everything smells of chips and gin”.
“I’m always the host because I love to cook and I love to DJ,” she says. “Sometimes I’ll put my decks on my living room table and just do a little set for my friends.”
Learning to cook, it transpires, was the second strand of her plan to reclaim some normality after the whirlwind of her early 20s.
“I was like, ‘I want to get good at this’, because when you’re coming down, you need to eat,” she laughs.
“I do a really nice roast chicken. I love doing a spread of tacos and salads… but the best hangover cure’s a proper English breakfast. That’ll get me right in the morning.”