Born To Be King

It's 2AM in London, and Archy Marshall is “currently in a girl's bedroom”, sounding suspiciously like he may've just had a sly smoke. The lateness of the hour – and, indeed, the baked drawl – have much in common with the music Marshall makes as King Krule. Singing in a deep, dark, gravelly voice, Marshall paints pained portraits of urban decay over music whose spartan samples and glinting guitars play almost as some bluesy counter to The xx, sung in slurs that make him sound like South London's answer to Tom Waits. It's music that sounds weathered, world-weary, and woe-betold; quite a feat for someone who, at the time of his boudoir phonecall, was still a week shy of his 19th birthday.

The main narrative, when listening to King Krule's music – and his debut LP, 6 Feet Beneath The Moon – is the contrast between Marshall's tender years/babyface, and the sound he makes. But, though still a teenager, he's already an old musical soul – harbouring the desire to make sound as some of his most formative memories. “One of my earliest memories, I remember looking at maracas, a really nice set of maracas,” Marshall recounts. “It's true. I still can remember that feeling: just being a kid, staring at them, and really wanting to be a musician.”

Marshall wrote his first song as an eight year-old, and became a fully-fledged songwriter at 12, rolling tape on an eight-track recorder that allowed him to assemble songs in isolation; the feeling he recalls was “like being a scientist”, with every day a new experiment. Eventually, he'd end up at a place so many prodigious English talents have, doing his high school study at the Brit School, whose alumni have populated endless girl-groups and talent-quests. Marshall's not so keen on talking about his school years, but wants to make sure that he's never spoken of as some sculpted talent, steered by the hands of others.

“My music has always been something I've done by myself,” Marshall says. “When I started, it was definitely about wanting to reach out to other people, trying to find guidance, to get that from other people, but I never did. My biggest influence just came from within. Music was just something I really wanted to do. It felt so natural, so urgent. It was just like a fact of nature for myself.”

By the time he made 6 Feet Beneath The Moon, music had become “a form of self-exploration” for Marshall. The LP marks a 14-song study of 19 years, its eldest tune dating back to when the songwriter was 12. In his early days, cutting his teeth as a home-recorder, Marshall initially called himself Zoo Kid, before switching to a handle inspired by Donkey Kong Country's King K. Rool for a debut, self-titled 2011 EP, released when he was 17. Many of the songs have already trickled out on previous releases, and they chart Marshall growing up, and coming-of-age on tape.

“It's about finding dark parts within yourself, about how the individual is a temple, a space to be explored,” Marshall says, of 6 Feet Beneath The Moon. “It's very much a clear homage to the individual, to one's self and the experience of yourself.”

Yet, contrastingly, this album about the individual as temple is just as much about dwelling amidst society; living in a city, surrounded by so many people, a sense of desperation in the air. “A lot of the [songs],” on 6 Feet Beneath The Moon, Marshall furthers, “are about feeling lost, about being lost. About feeling out of your depth. It's about feeling simultaneously out of control yet still controlled by other people. That's what the title means, 6 Feet Beneath The Moon: it's about being buried beneath the darkness, underneath what you look up to, what glows in the sky.”

While the press-release trumpets co-production by Rodaidh McDonald – who's worked with The xx and Savages – an under-discussed contributor to the sound of the record is long time Stereolab drummer Andy Ramsay, who served as engineer, studio boss, and essential gear-lender to Marshall. The teenager met him when they were both at work on Mount Kimbie's second LP, Cold Spring Fault Less Youth, on which King Krule guested on a pair of vocal performances, and from which Marshall learnt more than he expected. “It was, in many ways, uncomfortable for me, because I had no control at all,” he says. “The music wasn't created by me at all. And fitting my voice into their music, I couldn't use the same tricks and techniques that I was used to using in my own music. I was mapping my style to them, and it couldn't have felt more different. It taught me a lot about experiment, and different approaches.”

Though sounding world weary, Marshall is still young enough that every experience is a learning experience. Touring the world for the last two years has helped him “open [his] mind”, and he's unjaded enough to “fall in love with every new place” he stops at. Not just when he, say, plays a church in Warsaw (“It was weird: everyone was sat down to watch us play,” he recounts. “All the aisles were filled out, and all eyes were on me. There I was, at the front; it felt like I'd accidentally wandered in and been asked to do a service”), but by each crowd.

“It's still so early for me that I'm always fascinated by who's actually going to come and see me play,” says Marshall. “I'm genuinely interested to meet the people who like my music. It wasn't that long ago when I knew everyone who liked my music; it was just my friends. But now I can travel to somewhere like Nagano, Japan, and there will be people there, excited to see me play. It's quite mind blowing. It's unreal.”