Arlo Parks has announced Ambiguous Desire, her third album, due April 3. Coming two years after My Soft Machine, the record arrives as Parks has been consolidating a particular place in contemporary indie pop: emotionally direct, sonically warm, deeply concerned with the interior life of young people navigating a world that keeps providing new reasons for anxiety.

The album title does a lot of work. “Ambiguous desire” is exactly what Parks has been writing about since her debut, the feeling of wanting something you can’t fully name, or wanting things that point in different directions at once. Her first album, Collapsed in Sunbeams, made her famous enough that the follow-up had to reckon with that attention. My Soft Machine did that with more complexity, more production texture, more willingness to sit in discomfort rather than resolve it toward comfort.

Where Ambiguous Desire lands in that trajectory isn’t fully clear until it comes out Friday, but the lead material suggests she’s pushing further into the emotional register she’s been building toward: less the observer-narrator of her debut, more someone fully inside the experience she’s describing.

Parks has become one of the more thoughtful interview subjects in contemporary pop music, consistently articulate about her influences (Raymond Carver, Nina Simone, James Baldwin) and her intentions without explaining the work to death. That care shows in the writing. She doesn’t resolve things that shouldn’t be resolved, and she doesn’t pretend clarity where there isn’t any. For an artist who writes primarily about feeling, that’s the hardest discipline to maintain.

Ambiguous Desire is out April 3.