The man behind King Krule’s barbarian howl is a lover, not a fighter, but lean in close and the boundary gets foggy. The violence in Archy Marshall’s music arises from a romantic pathology—one that Marshall, who sings love songs the way Johnny Rotten sang “Anarchy in the UK,” knows intimately. “There’s a love in me to kill good things,” he once told an interviewer. Affection, fear, abandonment, fury—they’re all elements of Krule’s misery.
On his best albums to date, The Ooz and A New Place 2 Drown, the South London songwriter turned troubled waters into exquisite fountains. Aquatic symbolism, meticulous production, and pearly embellishments made his grotto feel, for a while, like somewhere you could bathe. His third album as King Krule sounds like what it is, which is anguish. The putrid air of Man Alive! turns even the sweetest songs sour, as if they were stowed inside his body so long they became dank and light-fearing.
That’s unlikely to alienate the fanbase for whom Marshall scoops out his guts. In a recent video for the narcotic lament “Don’t Let the Dragon (Draag On),” Marshall burns at the stake, martyring himself. Down in the comment section lurks his attendant brood of fatalists (“Clinical depression season is upon us, lads”), apostles (“If the moon could listen to music, he would listen to King Krule”), and solemn connoisseurs (“Like all great poetry, only a few will appreciate it”). Little surprise that this cult, formed during his teen explorations as Zoo Kid, has endured: The lanky London outlaw with cement-mixer lungs and a disastrous report card, redeemed by a volatile and monstrous talent, has a cute fairy-tale ring to it.
Into this mythos steps Man Alive!, aesthetically dire and fatefully timed. The record was halfway finished when, during a spell of habitual boozing, Marshall learned that his partner, Charlotte Patmore, was pregnant. Moving with her to North West England, he dredged his blues and completed the album as a requiem to urban ennui. It plays as a sort of diptych: First the wily escapades—four steely, corrupted punk blasts—then a trove of laments filled with despair, despondency, and occasional knives of light.
Marshall played and recorded nearly every instrument on Man Alive!—saxophonist Ignacio Salvadores also howls away—and the hollowed-out sound turns the darkness chilly. The opening suite’s Martin Hannett-style drums and weathered ambience evoke first-wave post-punk, when warped effects and dub spaciousness hinted at new worlds. But these songs are hammered into reality. In the barrens of “Comet Face” we encounter Marshall groggy, bloodied, and half-naked after being ambushed in a park in Peckham. But rather than seek vengeance, he mulls his hometown’s social cleansing, comparing London undesirables to “the pesticides in your vegetables”: Both have been erased in the quest for an organic utopia.
A vaporous interlude called “The Dream” partitions the album; after that, Marshall retreats into his head. On the luminous folk of “Slinky,” he takes an emotional pounding before flashing back to the “Comet Face” assault in a nightmare. Dial tones and answering-machine messages drift in and out, suggesting crossed wires and deferred responsibilities. A devotee of sound-art tinkerers like Dean Blunt, Marshall has a skill for collage that subtly points you beyond the song. If it all sounds exhaustingly conceptual, consider a recent playlist pick that, like Man Alive!, begins with grim newscasts, dips in and out of dream scenes, and hinges on a dramatic narrative lurch. It’s not some Lynchian exercise in obscurity; it’s “A Day in the Life,” by the Beatles.
Holding to Marshall’s wavelength requires a little more investment than the dingy music asks for, but that’s not to say his shadowland of the heart lacks nuance. The profound love—or perhaps addiction—described on “Perfecto Miserable” is double-edged, promising salvation by bottling up unresolved rage. Even the therapeutic mantras of “Alone, Omen 3” devolve, as an ambient fog descends, into nightmarish ravings.
Impending parenthood stabilizes Marshall, or at least offers relief from his exhausting lifestyle. “Passport in my pocket’s getting old/Feel the weight of the world dissolve,” he riddles on “Airport Antenatal Airplane.” Amid his innate playfulness, I’m often struck by Marshall’s intensity with words, the way he threads and knots them like jute rope to hoist himself out of psychic craters.
As for Man Alive!, Marshall has framed the title as a reaction to our diabolical political landscape. Given his fondness for aquatic metaphor, it could just as well herald a person saved. On this album of shipwrecking, there is a brief final act—played out in songs like the beseeching “Please Complete Thee”—that hints at this rescue, a dipping of toes into domesticity. Indeed, in a glowing photograph last March, Marshall and Patmore introduced us to their newborn daughter, Marina. Man Alive! maps an underworld of new places to drown; next time, he’ll finally have somewhere to dock.
