King Krule, a cult singer in the making, is setting the terms himself
His new album oozes ‘gritty stories’ with a sensitive side
Archy Marshall, the enigmatic South London singer best known as King Krule, is a creature of the night.
Known since the age of 15 as a preternaturally wise and unpredictable songwriter, Marshall, now 23, has assumed the mantle of a bard for the shrouded underclass, churning his anxiety, depression and insomnia into swampy, after-dark tales for the mischievous and disaffected.
On songs that mix jazz, punk, dub, hip-hop and the affectations of a zonked-out lounge crooner, he has cut what he calls “gritty stories about the streets” with a “sensitive and romantic side,” aiming to take “social realism and make it social surrealism.”
He’s also timelessly cool, a child of bohemia with a sharp proletarian edge, tall and model-gaunt with a gold-capped front tooth and a fluff of red hair.
“In the dead of night I howl/We all have our evils,” Marshall snarls in his harsh, accented baritone on the new King Krule album, “The Ooz,” out Oct. 13, returning to his typical themes.
It felt fitting, then, that after a few years away from New York — a city that, like London, values a grimy deadbeat with a pretentious side — King Krule played a secret show well after midnight,
in an overstuffed Manhattan dim sum restaurant known to certain youthful types for its after-hours parties and lax indoor smoking rules.
Huddled at a table among the fashionably dishevelled fans, Marshall, in red plastic sunglasses and an unreleased Supreme shirt, scrawled a set list in capital letters for the sweaty concert that would help mark his return to the underground hype cycle that threatens to deify him.
“Travelling so much, playing so much and being this character so much — it obscured me,” Marshall said in an interview at a gentrified bar in the Brooklyn neighbourhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant two days before the performance last month, recalling the vortex of attention that came with his debut LP, “6 Feet Beneath the Moon,” in 2013. (Even Beyoncé declared her fandom on Facebook.)
“I feel like I was too young and I went pretty headfirst into trying to carve a career out,” he continued. “It sounds cliché, but I kind of lost where I was coming from for a bit.”
“The Ooz” is a return to himself, written over three years when Marshall moved back in with his mother in East Dulwich in London.
At 19 tracks and more than an hour long, the album, his second as King Krule, feels like a swan dive into Marshall’s turbulent subconscious, jarring by design as it lurches from laid-back almost-rap (“Biscuit Town”) to post-Clash punk (“Dum Surfer”) back to ’50s-style rock ’n’ roll balladeering (“Lonely Blue”).
The titular “ooz” — a versatile metaphor that applies equally well to mental health and songwriting — represents all the excess crud our bodies are constantly discharging.
“You go to sleep and your nails grow, you get boogies, your hair, your teeth,” Marshall explained while chain-smoking. “You’ve got to refine it every day.”
The album, dense and uncompromising, as well as its delayed delivery, also places Marshall in a class of semi-reluctant indie idols like Frank Ocean, Earl Sweatshirt and James Blake — a cadre of cult artists in the making (and likeminded sometime collaborators) who have chosen to withdraw rather than ride the ego-dragon into commercial ubiquity.
All prodigy children of the internet who synthesized original combinations of influences — and adolescent angst — into fresh sounds, this group tends to inspire deep, loyal fandom with its commitment to artistic integrity and layered multimedia work.
“It’s about creating a universe for yourself,” said Marshall, who credits film (David Lynch, Jim Jarmusch, George A. Romero), literature (W.H. Auden, Charles Bukowski) and video games for his dedication to world-building and penchant for scattering referential Easter eggs.
Courting obsessive listeners and not flooding the market, Marshall said, is a survival tactic.
“You see kids, they make one good track, they do one great feature and then they’re everywhere, they’ve got a million people watching them,” he said. “I wanted to develop and preserve my art.”
“If you overdo it, people get sick of you,” he added. “I’ve just revelled in being kind of mysterious.” (In addition to King Krule, Marshall has made music under aliases including Zoo Kid, DJ JD Sports and Edgar the Beatmaker.)
Dean Bein, the founder of True Panther Sounds, Marshall’s label, wrote in an email that upon meeting the singer, at 15, “I knew he was special. Even then, he didn’t do anything for the look or for attention. His moves are always decisive.”
Bein recalled Marshall turning down a “super prominent magazine cover” early on “because he felt he hadn’t earned it yet.” Marshall was more blunt. “I remember even getting hit up by Kanye to go to the studio. Anyone else in my shoes would’ve done it,” he said. “I couldn’t be bothered.” It wasn’t out of a sense of superiority, he stressed, but because of the pressure to create on call.
“I like the physicality of living with someone, sleeping next to them, eating with them. And eventually we might make a tune,” Marshall said.
“I’ve turned down so many opportunities where I could maybe be rich right now.” He stopped himself with a laugh and an expletive. “Ugh, why didn’t I do it?”
Bein added: “As his record label, you can imagine this has often been frustrating,” but Marshall’s devotion to his art “easily trumps any frustration that might come from the counter-commercial moves he’s made over the years.”
For “The Ooz,” Marshall found inspiration in a combination of the conventional and the foreign.
Back in his old neighbourhood, he had collaborated with his older brother, Jack, on an art book and short film with a more beat-oriented soundtrack (“A New Place 2 Drown,” released in 2015 under his given name), but more traditional songwriting was not flowing.
“I was going to the same pubs, chilling with the same friends,” he said. “Then I got these two exotic people in my life and all of a sudden things started to change.”
One was a Spanish saxophonist named Ignacio Salvadores, who sent Marshall an unsolicited video on Facebook of himself playing under a London bridge.
Moved by its beauty, Marshall invited him to come play at a show that very night, and there, they jammed for hours — “no conversation, just straight playing music,” Marshall said. Salvadores went on to perform on much of the album.
Also featured on “The Ooz,” speaking a poem in Spanish, is a woman from Barcelona called a muse by Marshall.
“It gave me something romantic, every time I’d go home,” Marshall said. “Every night I’d play guitar and she’d be sat there and she’d look beautiful. It helped my outlook on myself and the record.”
Later on the album, Marshall’s father reads an English translation of the same poem, which again is packed with King Krule’s thematic connective tissue: isolation, drowning, the moon, the colour blue.
“Me and you against this city of parasites,” he concludes. “Parasite/paradise.”
Familial connections, including to his divorced parents, are another through line in Marshall’s work, a key to decoding his disparate influences and philosophical dogmas.
His mother (“a wild one”) is a musician and screen printer who recorded a “dub-jazz poetry record” and hung a portrait of Fela Kuti in her home, while his father, an art director and musician from a line of artists, introduced his son to classic rock.
“All of their taste is so refined and so cool,” Marshall said, as if he were giving away his secret.
“Everyone in my family can put pen to paper and sell it,” he added. “But they don’t sell it.”