Hidden behind narrow sunglasses and a zipped-up camo fleece, Archy Marshall is telling me about how his artistic antenna is always up: “I’m a walking product of being influenced by stuff.” Sometimes his allusions are conscious, like when he absorbed dream sequences from The Sopranos into his “Czech One” and “Alone, Omen 3” music videos. Other times, he’s apt to just name a song after whatever movie was buzzing in the background while he wrote it. There’s no beginning or end to his creative impulse.
Three albums into his career, Marshall’s distinctive sonic and lyrical lexicon as King Krule draws on itself as much as it does the outside inspirations that inevitably seep into his brain. He’s a one-man feedback loop: No matter what cultural flotsam enters his psyche, it exits as a part of the greater King Krule universe. Man Alive! is the latest product of this spongey process, bringing together downtrodden guitar, hip-hop beats, and street-lit saxophone to conjure his now-signature brand of beautiful murk. Here, Marshall lays out some of the keys that helped him unlock his latest work.
Shopping in supermarkets
Archy Marshall: In 2019, from the start to the end, I spent a lot of time in big supermarkets. And I always picked up on people’s conversations. The song “Supermarché” talks about propaganda and brainwashing, in the sense of how the media can infiltrate anything and influence anyone to believe something—and you hear some of the raw effects of that in places like the supermarket.
In the meantime, you’re comprehending what effect these food items are going to have on you, or what you need to get in order to progress in your life on a very simple level. You’re thinking about ingredients, about combinations. I’ve got a big thing for sauces—when I go to the sauce section, I’ll get hungry.
Cartoon Network’s Adventure Time
“(Don’t Let the Dragon) Draag On” is a reference to an Adventure Time episode I watched obsessively on tour. We’d get to a hotel, have a day off, and I wouldn’t go out. I’d just watch Adventure Time. I love it. I love the way it looks. I love the drawings and the way they move. And the audio is really nice too. When I first started watching it, I thought it was just one-off episodes, but then it really strings together. It goes so deep. It’s quite moving.
Singer-songwriter Nilüfer Yanya
On this album, I sampled an a capella she sent me of her song “Small Crimes.” I loved that song, and I loved how her voice sounded on it. I made some remixes of it for her, and then I just kept using it. I used her voice as an instrument on a lot of songs, cut it up and played it like a keyboard. On songs like “Antenatal Airplane,” if I needed a texture, I would take it out and play it like a piano.
King Krule’s 2017 album The OOZ
In everything I’ve written and everything I continue to write, I’ll always refer to my own metaphors and the universe that I created. I will always use those as landmarks and points to get across what I’m trying to say.
Electricity towers
I was traveling a lot on motorways and trains, and I started to notice them more and more. They’re structures that carry big wires and cords across countries, and they stick out from the landscape, as if they’re these skeletal beings. They really disregard the nature of the landscape, and I find that quite incredible. As soon as you start noticing them, you kind of can’t stop. The ones in France are so beautiful. I spent a lot of time just taking loads of photos and videos of them. I don’t know how they influenced the record, exactly, but they influenced me—and if anything’s influenced me, it has to influence the record.
King Krule side project Hypno Disk
Hypno Disk influenced both this record and The OOZ. It happened in a moment after I came back from touring [2013’s] 6 Feet Beneath the Moon, when I needed a new feeling of freedom in my life. It was just a really easy space to create stuff that could be whatever it wanted to be. And that band was influenced by the show Robot Wars, which I used to watch when I was a kid. Hypno-Disc was my favorite robot on the show.
Guitars
My guitar has been my best friend since I was 8 years old. It’s given me money; it’s given me love; it’s given me hatred; it’s given me pain. I like writing on it, and I like playing it. It doesn’t really matter what guitar, as long as it feels good to me. I like smaller guitars, cheaper guitars, guitars I can destroy sometimes. It’s given me all these things, and I just want to respect that relationship.
King Krule saxophonist Ignacio “Galgo” Salvadores
I’ve known Galgo since about 2016—he sent me a video on Facebook of him playing saxophone under a bridge in East London, and he sounded good. I’ve got my own boundaries, my own borders, my own way of letting people in, but that didn’t seem to be the case when I saw that video. That night, we met up and started to play, and he became a pretty big part of my life. It just feels so good to play with him. On previous records, I’d always have sax players, but I never had a solid one. I just love the tone of the sax. We recorded one of the songs from the new album, “Stoned Again,” together in 2016, even before The OOZ.
The Omen Trilogy
I was writing the lyrics to “Alone, Omen 3” as I was watching the films. I watched the first one, the second one, and as I watched the third one, I started to finish the end of the song. And you know what happens? Damien—the son of the devil—becomes the president of America.
