Listen to new festive covers from Arlo Parks, James Blake and Beabadoobee

Arlo Parks, James Blake and Beabadoobee have released new festive covers on Apple Music.

• The NME Big Read: Arlo Parks: “I feel like I’m 10 and 100 at once”

The three artists’ renditions come as part of the streaming platform’s Christmas singles series, which was launched yesterday (November 30).

Parks took on Wham!‘s ‘Last Christmas’, reimagining the 1986 hit as a minimal, soulful number. Beabadoobee, meanwhile, offered up a charming version of the 1939 yuletide staple ‘Winter Wonderland’.

Going for a slightly more left-field choice, Blake covered the traditional Christmas carol ‘In the Bleak Midwinter’. You can listen to the tracks below.

Explaining his pick to Apple Music’s Zane Lowe, Blake reasoned that “all the pop Christmas songs have been covered a million times” in the past, adding that he has “a huge fondness for choral music, Anglican Church spiritual vibes, even though I’m not particularly religious.”

He continued: “There’s something very appealing to me about the feeling I get from classical choral music. And I loved it when Jeff Buckley did that cover of ‘Corpus Christi’. In the back of my mind, there’s always been a thing where I’ve got to tackle something [like that].”

Arlo Parks recently shared a new single called ‘Caroline’, which is set to appear on her forthcoming debut album ‘Collapsed In Sunbeams’ (released in January). The song follows ‘Green Eyes’, ‘Hurt’ and ‘Black Dog’ in previewing the record.

“My album is a series of vignettes and intimate portraits surrounding my adolescence and the people that shaped it,” Parks explained. “It is rooted in storytelling and nostalgia – I want it to feel both universal and hyper-specific.”

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