King Krule - Man Alive!

The Guardian 80

(XL)

Archy Marshall has been refining his woozy, washed-out sounds since he emerged back in 2010. With each release under his King Krule moniker, he has shown a proclivity for deeply emotive, expansive musicality steeped in urban loneliness. Since his last album as King Krule, 2017’s Mercury-nominated The Ooz, Marshall and his partner have had a child and moved out of London – he seems happier, lighter for it.

Like its predecessors, Man Alive! was recorded at night, and it swims languorously with romance and tenderness, deftly pulling sonics from jazz, post-punk, soul and dubstep. Through the dreamlike wails of sax and scuzz, optimism seeps through. “The rain will pass in time,” he advises on Alone, Omen 3. Marshall’s grizzled vocals ebb and flow, from lamenting “another lonely night” to declaring “you’re my everything” on Perfecto Miserable. On closing track Please Complete Thee, he despairs about “everything just constantly letting me down” over charged synths and pining guitar reverb, before the tone shifts to something more uplifting and twinkling. The final refrain of “please complete me” carries a powerful sense of hope – an end befitting an album that finds King Krule hitting a new stride.

Pitchfork 77

The lanky London outlaw with cement-mixer lungs delivers his most anguished album yet, in which impending fatherhood collides with his habitual torments.

The Guardian 40

(XL Recordings)
The south Londoner’s third album offers flashes of brilliance but is weighed down by a tone of gravelly gloom

King Krule, AKA 25-year-old south London native Archy Marshall, has always let his work sprawl. His 2013 debut, 6 Feet Beneath the Moon, was a staggeringly novel and sometimes exquisite mashup of laptop hip-hop, smoky jazz and folk-punk, yet it was also loose and listless: a collection of guitar figures and gravelly moans that periodically coalesced into greatness.

Man Alive!, his third album as King Krule, maintains many facets of his still beguiling original sound – the uneasy synth washes, the foregrounded strumming, his bassy rasp. But the fragments of melody and bursts of momentum that carried his previous material (2017’s The Ooz was pretty impressionistic but at least featured some singalong segments) have largely gone. Instead, Man Alive! is mainly concerned with evoking disgust, dissolution and despair via vague choruses, eerie vocal samples and dogged dissonance.