Arlo Parks's first new song since the release of her hugely successful debut album Collapsed In Sunbeams comes with a luminous visual by directing duo Zhang + Knight - their first music video since London Grammar's Lose Your Head a year ago.

For Softly - a song about "how fragile you feel in the dying days of a relationship when you’re still desperately in love" according to Parks - the directing team create a version of the real world which slowly unravels, layer by layer.

What initially looks like an idealised, picture perfect location is gradually decontructed. The early sense of the singer being in a mid-century studio movie or musical is gradually undercut, as the staging is revealed and comes apart at the seams, leaving the constituent elements floating in surreal space. 

The marvel is that like their previous successful works for Eden and aforementioned London Grammar, everything is created in-camera - in this case at a film studio in Kiev.

"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," explain Zhang and Knight. "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 colours 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."