Ambiguous Desire feels like a deep conversation in the overwhelming throng of the dancefloor: It’s both intimate and expansive; finding pockets of stillness in the chaos. On her third album, Arlo Parks chases a high against a backdrop of shapeshifting drums: skittering breakbeats, jazzy shuffles, and ghostly, Burial -lite 2-step. The alternately gloomy and euphoric pop songs cut and paste snippets of UK pirate radio culture and New York’s Paradise Garage. These echoes of dance music’s past inject new life into the 25-year-old British artist’s soft-spoken oeuvre.

Parks wrote the album during a period spent club-hopping in Brooklyn and Queens—she cites Nowadays and BASEMENT as favorites—and she describes this time as something of a delayed adolescence. Parks rose to fame in her teens, winning the Mercury Prize for her 2021 debut album Collapsed in Sunbeams , a diaristic clutch of pleasant soft-rock songs.…