KING KRULE ALBUM REVIEW

4.1/5

The producer born Archy Marshall crafted The OOZ to be alien and timeless. It is the richest and most immersive album the London singer-songwriter has made yet, under any name.

Archy Marshall doesn’t star in his own music—he wanders through it. You might find him spotlit and centre stage, foregrounding his violent voice like a fist denting chrome. Or you might find him muttering quietly to himself in the margins, barely audible. He might fail to show up entirely, letting the thickly painted sounds of his productions do

all the talking for him. Listening to the London singer- songwriter’s music sometimes feels like waiting for a sea creature to surface: We only ever catch furtive glimpses of him before he disappears again.

He’s recorded as Zoo Kid, as King Krule, and under his own name. There might be some internal logic at work in the different aliases, or it might just be the natural behaviour of a hermit crab scuttling between temporary homes. In any case, his magnetic and midnight-black new album The OOZ is his first release as “King Krule” since 2013’s 6 Feet Beneath the Moon, which was his breakthrough and his first release for XL Recordings. Why the return of Krule is probably a secret only the grim-faced Marshall knows; perhaps the moniker is reserved for the music he makes with his vocals front and centre, the guise where he plays at being a front-man. Or perhaps the name is a statement of purpose, of new-found confidence. Whatever the case, The OOZ is the richest and most immersive album he’s made yet, under any name, by some distance.

On 6 Feet Beneath the Moon, he was still raw and only 19 years old, working uneasily under the guiding hand of producer Rodaidh McDonald. Since then, he has wrested control of nearly every knob dictating his sound, and The OOZ feels like a piloted journey deep, deep into suffocating loneliness. Down here, genre boundaries blur or disappear, so depending on the angle you approach The OOZ, you will find yourself listening to a trip-hop record, a dub record, to punk rock, to tender jazz balladry, or watery R&B. The guitars, slightly out of tune strummed hard and imperfectly, are back in the mix for the first time since 6 Feet Beneath the Moon. But everything is hard

to make out on its own, so each listen sprouts rich new suggestions: When he barks the title of “Dum Surfer” over fat saxophones, it sounds for the world like “don’t suffer.”

In his mouth, words create distance as often as they communicate an idea. Over and over again, he tells us how far we are from him, speaking both plainly and in riddles to keep us at arm’s length. “He left the crime scene without the Motorola/Still had dreams of being Gianfranco Zola,” he mumbles on “Biscuit Town,” a decontextualized scene like a piece of aircraft fell to earth. Other people, when they appear, are usually fallen and unhelpful—“Yeah, she scatters just like one of the people,” he screams on “Vidual,” a howl of bitter scorn and betrayal. On “Logos,” he offers us the chilling image: “I caught my mum, she stumbles home/Through open ground, back to broken homes,” hinting at the sort of necessities that might have led to the development of his wild-eyed, insistent solitude.

He’s long played the bridge troll underneath human civilization, a creature with a fearsome bark and a lonesome heart, but on The OOZ he luxuriates in the role with new-found comfort. “I wish I was people,” he mumbles on “The Locomotive,” and there’s something almost funny about it. The spot where disgust turns seductive, where rot becomes ferment—this is his home. Everything we find truly sexy as adults, after all, repulses us as children, and the sour atmosphere of the music seems to come from this place: the realization that maybe some revolting experiences have subsidiary benefits. “Slipping into filth/Lonely but surrounded/A new place to drown/Six feet beneath the moon,” he has his dad recite on “Bermondsey Bosom (Right).” He sounds peaceful, even gentle. The world is a filthy, utterly debased place, his music suggests, but there are rewards of sorts for those determined to survive it. In this spirit, The OOZ drops at our feet like a piece of poisoned fruit, a masterpiece of jaundiced vision from one of the most compelling artists alive at the moment.

Artist: King Krule

Album: The OOZ

Label: True Panther & XL

Released: September 2017

Style: Alternative/Indie

01. Biscuit Town

02. The Locomotive

03. Dum Surfer

04. Slush Puppy

05. Bermondsey Bosom Left

06. Logos

07. Sublunary

08. Lonely Blue

09. Cadet Limbo

10. Emergency Blimp

11. Czech One

12. (A Slide In) New Drugs

13. Visual

14. Bermondsey Bosom Right

15. Half Man Half Shark

16. The Cadet Leaps

17. The Ooz

18. Midnight 01

19. La Lune