Everyone I know has jobs, whereas I’d sit on my arse all day sometimes not doing anything, then I’d go to the pub with them when they finished work. “There really is nothing else to do here, especially when it turns to winter. “It was just the easiness of it,” he reflects today. Impending parenthood came at a felicitous moment for him, as he was beginning to feel trapped in South London’s suburban lifestyle of all-eclipsing drunkenness and depression, which existing fans will know was a recurring theme in his earlier music. “I should’ve had it all wrapped up before my daughter was born,” says Marshall today with a sheepish grin, during a return visit to his favorite public house in Nunhead, right across the street from Shrunken Heads. Midway through those sessions, however, Archy found out he was going to become a dad for the first time, and he decided to move up to the North West to be near the mother’s family, ready for the baby’s arrival. Increasingly self-sufficient in the studio, he manned most of the instruments himself, except for the saxophone, which was played by his trusty Argentinian amigo, Ignacio Salvadores. This third King Krule album was written as a direct reaction to the non-stop energy of touring The Ooz, and then partly recorded at Shrunken Heads in Marshall’s native stamping ground of Nunhead, with Ooz co-producer Dilip Harris.
Unlike that record, Man Alive! doesn’t aim to present any kind of narrative thread, or Brexit-era state-of-the-nation address, just a collection of snapshots and stories, artfully sequenced into a dazzlingly coherent whole. There’s a lot to catch up on, after 2017’s sprawling masterpiece, The Ooz, broke through amid Mercury Prize nominations and minds-blown media plaudits. Like any great artist on the rise, Archy’s life is moving fast. Marshall has emerged as a pack leader amongst his peers, leading the charge in a fearless blurring of genre divisions, one minute seeming to drag the listener through the trashiest punk experience, the next ushering in a soundworld that’s apparently hi-tech and forward-looking.
ARCHY IVAN MARSHALL FULL
It arrives packed full of his trademark sonic ambition and compositional skill, as well as the now-familiar corrosive lyricism and lurid social observation.
ARCHY IVAN MARSHALL PLUS
After two feverishly received albums as King Krule, plus another low-key outing under his own name, this extraordinarily gifted 25-year-old from Peckham in South London adds further depth and substance to his oeuvre with another wondrous long-player called Man Alive!. Archy Ivan Marshall has the world at his feet.
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