King Krule - The Ooz (2017)

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King Krule - The Ooz (2017)

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Deemed a voice of his generation when he was only a teenager, Archy Marshall returns with The Ooz, an odyssey through the disenchanted worlds inside and outside his skull.

It’s a warm Thursday evening in south-east London, but the backyard of Archy Marshall’s local pub is convinced it’s high summer in Honolulu. Palm fronds and eucalyptus branches line the entryway, as if primed for a visiting toucan. The resolutely un-tropical songwriter known as King Krule sits nestled at a side table, consuming a steady supply of beer and cigarettes. Slouching and lackadaisical, Marshall is a curious fit amid the kitschy opulence, like an outsider art piece hung in an Ikea. Halfway into our chat, a suburban hooligan scrambles downhill by the pub, shrieking at an adversary while a woman clings to his shoulders. Patrons cast wary glances; Marshall barely blinks. “That was weird,” he mutters, before returning to the matter at hand: gunk.

“It’s all about the gunk,” Marshall says, staring me in the eye.

The 23-year-old’s new album, The Ooz, emerged from a period of writer’s block rooted in creative exhaustion and personal inertia that stymied him in a serious way. Gunk—a metaphor for the oozing, inexorable forces that make us human—is what binds it together.

“It’s all about the shit you do subconsciously,” Marshall goes on, “like the snot, the earwax, your spit, your jizz, your piss, your shit.” He pauses, forgetting something. “Your beard, your nails—all of that shit. You don’t ever think, Wow, I’m actually pushing all this stuff constantly—my brain’s creating all this gunk, this forcefield.” His eyes swing back to his pint. “And I guess that kind of saved the whole thing.”

That “whole thing” is the concept driving The Ooz, a dense odyssey through Marshall’s subconscious. It’s the product of fleeting personal obsessions, ideas snatched at, half-digested, and regurgitated as a sludge of fluid, impressionistic music. Over two conflicted years, Marshall variously conceived the album as a revival of trashy punk rock, a conceptual deep-dive into his family history, and a worldly, multilingual mélange, partly dreamed up to seduce a young woman visiting him from Barcelona.

It came to resemble all and none of the above: a heady blend of jazz flourishes and neo-soul beats; a diaristic blues opus struck, now and then, by psychedelic grunge thunderclaps; and a surrealistic account of Marshall’s struggles with depression and insomnia, interwoven with dreamlike nods to distant cities and foreign tongues. By the time his Spanish muse flew home last year, with no plans to return, Marshall had amassed enough gunk to fill his creative reservoir.

The day we meet, in mid-August, it’s been nearly four years since Marshall released 6 Feet Beneath the Moon, his debut album as King Krule, on his 19th birthday. That record saw him crowned as underground London’s new poster boy—a talented, knife-blade lean misfit seemingly conjured from the urban dystopia of a Mike Leigh drama, with a voice like gravel in a tumble dryer. He sang romantically of disenchantment, tapping into the frustrations of young Londoners swamped by the capital’s aspirational deluge.

Since then, Marshall has left a trail of musical footprints—murky post-punk jams, rap productions under his Edgar the Beatmaker alias (including one for Earl Sweatshirt), and 2015’s A New Place 2 Drown, a vibe-heavy hip-hop daydream released under his own name, alongside a book of art and poetry made in collaboration with his brother. But King Krule remains the truest artistic incarnation of Archy Marshall, the project that portrays him as a young man attuned to both the ugliness of the world outside and the more fragile universe within.

Since 6 Feet Beneath the Moon, Marshall had found the character he wanted King Krule to portray—his own—in flux. Part of the impasse traced back to his love life: He was seeing a long-term partner, happily, but eventually felt contentment was sapping his creativity. That relationship ran its course, and in early 2016, he invited his Spanish acquaintance to live with him. It quickly became serious.

“That particular girl really got me to write this record,” he tells me, gazing into his lap. “I wanted to impress her. Every day, it was like: read this, look at this, come with me here.” The Ooz’s spoken-word piece “Bermondsey Bosom”—which appears twice on the album, in English and Spanish—reminisces about a romance that lifted his urban blues: “Me and you against this city of parasites/Parasite, paradise, parasite, paradise.”

Marshall was also disenchanted with the music being made around him. “My boys were all rappers, all beatmakers,” he says. “I’d even influenced them to start creating, and we started to compete.” As his friends’ collective talents grew, Marshall became trapped in a world of his own making. “I took a step back, like: Wait, man, I haven’t listened to a good guitar record in ages—that’s what I do.”

One day, a mysterious video landed in his Facebook inbox. It captured a solitary baritone saxophonist raising hell under a bridge in east London. With an upcoming improv gig in mind, he messaged the sender, an Argentine man named Ignacio: “Come down and let’s see what happens.” That night, as Ignacio’s sax wailed into Marshall and his friends’ genre-crossing morass, the frustrated songwriter saw his obsessions with jazz, bossa nova, hip-hop, and punk swirl into focus.

He entered a period of renewed creativity, and The Ooz crystallized. In his telling, the new songs fall somewhere between sound art—he talks up Dean Blunt and Dirty Beaches, mavericks of reference-heavy pop-noir—and elevator music, the rendering of idle thoughts and ambient isolation. An alluring haze hangs over the record, with rich grooves that seem processed through shot synapses. Melodies creep from the shadows, carrying along lyrics full of abstractions and insecurities. “I saw some crimes when I was young and now my brain is gunk,” he sings on “Vidual.” “I don’t trust anyone, only get along with some.”

To better delve into his subconscious, Marshall began to sidle along branches of his family tree, drawing up a psychogeographical map of his ancestry. Researching a diary left by his grandmother—a senior employee at footwear giant Bata—he unearthed a saga spanning Trinidad, Peru, Prague, Berlin, and Panama, before she settled in London. (Marshall says that, while his mother’s side of the family spent the prewar period living “like aristocrats,” their fortunes nosedived in the UK.)

Family on his mind, Marshall had his father, an art director and set designer, read “Bermondsey Bosom (Right)” on The Ooz. Elsewhere, the title of “Half Man Half Shark” references a song his dad composed in his youth called “Body of a Man in the Belly of a Horse.” Marshall’s song begins with both father and son shouting a conflation of the songs’ titles, before erupting into a carnivalesque anthem of lust and rage. In the end, Marshall sings: “See world you’ll never know/At least when you look to the stars they still glow/Well, not for me though.” It’s a classic Krule sentiment—confrontational yet romantic, with a narrator excluded from a universe whose promises linger out of reach.

Shortly before our interview, Marshall perches for photos on a stool by the pub’s back door. As patrons spot the camera, startle, and come to a halt just out of shot, he enacts a chummy routine, waving a gregarious arm and beckoning to them: “Get involved!” He repeats the line one time after another, delighting both tipsy parents and kids skeptical of his apparent celebrity. If the attention faintly disconcerts Marshall, he’s learned to embrace it. “I used to sit on the toilet and imagine doing interviews about my music,” he admits later, flashing a grin. “And it happened.”