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.”
Marshall and his brother grew up between their costume- and set-designer mum’s house, in south-east London’s East Dulwich district, and, on odd weekends, their dad’s more middle-class flat in nearby Peckham. “My mum wasn’t really there that much,” Marshall says, doodling on a Polaroid of himself from the photo shoot. Does he wish she had been? “Yeah... I wish I got better meals.” He laughs. “I didn’t know how to cook. We ate a lot of frozen food and takeaways.”
In other ways, life in a loose, artistic household suited him. Marshall’s mom often took him to concerts, threw wild house parties, and, in quiet moments, would dissuade him from TV in favor of art and music. He remembers writing his first songs at age 8—“the trashiest shit, singing in an American voice”—and later recording prepubescent experiments on a Roland 8-track, the machine that would consume his early adolescence.
At a pub just up the road from where he’s telling me all this, Marshall, then around 12, performed what he calls his first “good song.” Impressed, a coterie of pot-smoking, skinny-jean-wearing indie kids drew him into their orbit. Weed and music elevated him from a bored, awkward kid to a wilder entity. He was often excluded from school for, by his admission, “stupid dumb shit where I really deserved it,” usually involving drugs or graffiti. He wound up at an education center for expelled kids. “I was getting bullied,” he admits. “It was quite a weird time.” Marshall met a fellow oddball who seemed to share his interests; every lunchtime, they’d disappear off-site and smoke away their appetites.
The local government threatened to imprison his parents if he wouldn’t bend to the education system. A homeschooling experiment with his father ignited little academic passion, not least because his dad’s dawn-till-dusk hours meant Marshall would spend long days alone, burdened with books like Oliver Twist. “That shit was hard to read,” he recalls, grimacing. “Charles Dickens refers to Fagin as an old Jew for a lot of it. It’s like, Ugh, what’s going on!”
Boredom had its rewards, though. In his free time, Marshall became enshrined in musical wormholes. “It was a time when music was essentially trash,” Marshall says of the mid-2000s. “Indie, pop, the Libertines, that sort of thing. But it was quite influential on me. Albums like [Justin Timberlake and Timbaland’s] FutureSex/LoveSounds really threw my mind—the production was crazy.”
Marshall’s lifeline was the arts-minded BRIT School, where classes mixing politics, sociology, and music history coax unconventionally minded pupils into a relaxed form of education. As Marshall puts it, “I met a load of people who were soft and into similar fucking pansy music I was into.”
A major factor in Marshall’s progress was Derek Moir, a senior faculty member and onetime guitarist in postpunk outfit This Poison!, which helped prop up Scotland’s DIY scene in the 1980s. On his first day, Marshall swaggered up to Moir claiming to recognize him—and was promptly sent away. On another occasion, he walked into class with a foppish, New Romantic-style haircut. “Derek looked at me and said, ‘Why the hell have you got that haircut?’” Marshall remembers, laughing. “There was a really good connection. I hated him but I loved him. But he gave me a place to actually be romantic and be all right with it, rather than going down the same old lines.”
Moir remembers the young Marshall fondly. “He was a bit awkward and gangly and ginger but he had confidence,” he tells me, speaking by phone from the BRIT School. If Marshall sometimes lacked patience, Moir says, he made up for it by obsessing over his pet subjects. “Initially he was quite shy, but he was politically and socially aware. He wanted to grasp as much as he possibly could about the world, and you could see he was trying to fuse that with his art.”
Marshall’s three years at BRIT weren’t all rosy—he still smoked every day, and when threats of expulsion loomed, Moir was forced to speak up on his behalf. But in the end, Marshall orchestrated his own exit. At 17, partway into a music course, he abruptly switched lanes to art. “He felt he’d learned all he could in music,” Moir says. Nobody seemed to argue—by that point, Marshall’s reputation as a prodigy was cemented.
For years, Marshall had been developing a nocturnal crooner style, drawing on the Streets’ UK hip-hop, Chet Baker’s smoky jazz, and the throbbing ambience of early dubstep, all rooted in his teenage marriage-of-convenience to indie-rock. In 2009, when Marshall was 14, he released his debut EP, $Quality, as Zoo Kid. More than the UK’s previous guard of social commentators, Marshall made songs that were dark and soulful, seemingly exorcised from a loner’s mind as he stared at his laces on a dusky corner. “I was getting more into leftwing politics and being like, Fuck all this money shit around me,” Marshall says of the time, not without fondness.
Marshall burned around 20 copies of the EP onto CD-Rs and tried to sell them at school for a fiver, complete with stickers and hand-cut inlays. It didn’t take. “No one wanted to buy them,” he says, still mildly affronted.
A year later, when Marshall was 15, he released U.F.O.W.A.V.E, a trove of poetic lo-fi recordings including the luminous “Out Getting Ribs.” These songs connected: His warehouse-vast production and epic melancholy made teen isolation sound enchanting. Record labels, fellow students, and music blogs lit up. But Marshall remained unsatisfied, particularly with live audiences.
“When I played these terrible pub gigs, and there’d be no one about, I’d stare straight in people’s eyes and sing, like, Yo, you fucking laughing?” he says. “It was a tool to empower myself. I wanted people to be scared of me.”
Talking about “Out Getting Ribs,” he continues, “I feel like a lot of people don’t realize, when you’re as soft and as open as that—they miss the anger behind it. Even when I play it with my band, even with people that I love, I sometimes think, Fuck all of you. You don’t know what the fuck I’m talking about. You don’t even know where this comes from. That’s how I treated the music at the time, and I still treat it as a big ‘fuck you.’ I’m angry.”
As Marshall’s success brought new challenges, his family flourished in the slipstream. His mom now sells shirts that she designed through Marshall’s clothing site, and A New Place 2 Drown was just one collaboration that brought attention to his brother’s art—in 2014, for instance, the siblings co-created the exhibition Inner City Ooz, a spiritual precursor to the new LP. I ask if, when he was starting out, Marshall’s musical aptitude eased his parents’ concerns about his future. He becomes animated: “You know what—as soon as my music was successful, it was like, Fuck you to everyone. I’m the breadwinner now. I’m the dude who brings in a lot of money and opportunity for all of them.” He straightens his shoulders, a half-jokey gesture of pride. “There’s a certain level of respect that they’ve given me now,” he adds.
The plan had been for Marshall and I to chat for an hour and a half, but by the time he’s finished—swerving into discourses on David Lynch, Martin Scorsese, Maoism, and broad swathes of postwar European history—it’s near closing time, and the pub terrace has emptied. Maybe it’s the booze, or the lack of lingering ears, but Marshall lets his intelligence reveal itself as night descends. When I ask if he has genuine concerns about upwardly mobile London, he rattles off some communist theory without skipping a beat—“London throughout history was the place of how to control the proletariat”—but finally shrugs, perhaps wary of seeming self-righteous. “Globalization’s about,” he concludes. “I can’t say that I believe in anything now.”
Marshall tends to think locally, both in his politics and his insular music, but he’s an unconvincing nihilist. A lifelong resident of south-east London, he’s seen waves of renewal transform his local stomping grounds, particularly in his dad’s neighborhood of Peckham. After sneering at the gentrifiers who swagger down local backstreets, though, he checks himself, finding a sense of empathy. “When you see that dude claiming all of the stuff you grew up in, that pain is huge,” he says, “but that same motherfucker in the stupid getup might be the most real dude.” For all his passion, Marshall can’t help seeing nefarious motives on both sides. “Where do you draw the line? Is it when they benefit you, now that all these hipsters are employing us to play? Well, what a fucking hypocrite you are.”
A fleeting couplet on The Ooz—“The cityscape/Bourgeoisie change to replicate”—is a veiled comment on the matter, and one of the record’s few kernels of social commentary. More often, the album speaks to the mental toll of disenfranchisement. Anxiety looms in recurring metaphors—drowning pools, oncoming trains, lonely moons. The punk dirge of “Emergency Blimp” alludes to Marshall’s unsuccessful state treatment for insomnia with a cryptic mantra: “no help still.”
Marshall now limits his weed intake and recently moved back in with his mom, re-establishing an order that waned as he worked on The Ooz at his own flat in London. But he’s still susceptible to sleepless nights and, occasionally, paranoia. “I had a really bad thought—it felt like a nightmare—where I felt tiny compared to all the jazz musicians I know because I don’t play well,” he tells me. “I almost get this scenario in my head where someone turns ’round to me and says, ‘You’re just a fucking pop artist.’ And I started to believe in it for a second.”
With The Ooz, Marshall fashioned those same limitations into an unsparingly personal kind of art: Without the vulnerability, the despair, the chaotic ambition—even the writer’s block—the album would not exist. For his part, Marshall seems to have emerged largely unscathed. As the pub closes, he makes small talk with the bartenders while half-heartedly ordering a cab to a nearby house party. In the car, he reflects on a monthlong weed-and-beatmaking binge with Earl Sweatshirt last year, a time of absent inspiration, when self-doubt would cause lyrics to dissolve on his tongue. For a moment he seems embarrassed, but his reticence soon passes. “All my writing was a bit trash,” he remembers casually, gazing out the window, “and I felt under-confident about it.” He turns inward, with an ambiguous grin. “But now I’m back to being this generation’s best poet.”
