Archy Marshall, better known as King Krule, doesn’t really do interviews like a salesman. He meanders, mutters, contradicts himself, then drops the kind of line that makes you stop and wonder if he’s been writing the whole conversation in his head. He’s here to talk about Man Alive! — exclamation point included — a record that swims through depression, isolation, parenthood, and strange little sonic detours like co-opting a cappella voices as instruments.
The stripped-down Hey World! short film offered an early glimpse. It looked like a lo-fi homage to grainy VHS and late-80s art school reels. “The guitar’s been with me since I was a kid,” he said. “It’s given me money, love, hatred, despair. I just wanted to make the most of that, you know?” For him, it wasn’t about polishing songs for a commercial, it was about catching them raw in the snow, on tape, surrounded by whatever environment happened to be choking him at the moment.
Parenthood, inevitably, came up. He shrugs at the weight critics and interviewers place on it. “It’s one of the biggest changes in my life, for sure. But I’m still just walking around breathing the same ways I used to. I don’t pay too much attention to that.” In other words, yes, becoming a dad will change you, but no, don’t expect him to write lullabies.
On the first single, “Don’t Let the Dragon Drag On,” Marshall writes about depression with the advantage of hindsight instead of suffocating in the middle of it. When asked about the song’s title, he casually invoked a sci-fi reference. “I don’t know, it was just this system I was into at the time,” he said, half-explaining, half-deflecting. He admits to being drawn to outside textures, which is why Norwegian experimentalist Nilla Fjærra’s voice appears not as a duet partner but as an instrument. “I kind of just used those voices as an instrument. I really like foreign textures. I’m very tolerant textural kind of person. I kind of sleep in that when I listen to music.”
His listening diet, as ever, is eclectic and half-accidental. A Spotify playlist associated with him includes Solange, Nina Simone, and — unexpectedly — The Beatles. “I’d always hated them,” he admitted with a smirk. “But then I realized that I really like them.” That late-in-life revelation led him to single out “A Day in the Life,” not for its grand orchestrations but for its lyrical approach, which he says connects to the way he writes.
Even short pieces like Man Alive!’s “The Dream,” a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it song barely past the minute mark, arrive fully formed. “Sometimes the recording is just the moment in time,” he said. “That was the transition. Anyway, I really wrote it for transition.” Finished or not, he lets them live as they are, refusing to varnish or elongate.
That’s King Krule in a nutshell: a man allergic to polish, suspicious of easy narratives, but still capable of producing something startlingly beautiful. He’ll tell you he doesn’t overthink it. Don’t believe him.
Listen to the interview above and then check out the videos below.
