The OOZ

Archy Marshall doesn’t star in his own music—he wanders through it. You might find him spotlit and center 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 behavior 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 center, the guise where he plays at being a frontman. Or perhaps the name is a statement of purpose, of newfound 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. The sound is tarry, warm, wet: Overwhelming bass lines, the kind that make you aware of the screws in your subwoofers, lurk beneath trebly keyboard chords with flecks of jazz harmonies embedded in them, like glass shards in a carpet. 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 all 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.

Marshall’s music is one of overwhelming nausea but also overwhelming determination, an iron will and a sickened heart working in tandem. “Half man with the body of a shark” he repeats 21 times on, well, “Half Man Half Shark,” a freakish vision of a hybrid creature with no resting state. Later in that same song, he yelps, “Twisted raw adrenaline/Racing through my bones, racing through my body,” sounding electrocuted by his own nervous system. Elsewhere, he refers to insomnia, nights haunted by memories, and pills that don’t work.

But beneath all this desperation, as usual, are luxurious moods and textures, ones that make self-loathing sound so visceral, so tactile, he almost confuses you into wanting it. He makes some of the most gorgeous sounds of any working producer: There is a faintly out-of-tune guitar swelling like buckling linoleum behind him on “The Locomotive,” a disoriented sound sent spinning into deep space by a distant alarm. Your ears want to follow it, to track it until the second it disappears. The diffused piano that waters through “Cadet Limbo,” or the snare knock and high whine of “Biscuit Town,” or the wash of eroding synths that disintegrate one Hz at a time over four minutes of “The Cadet Leaps”—a life spent tormented and alone has few comforts, but Marshall girds himself with gloriously odd sounds, each as piercingly memorable as a lost lover.

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 newfound 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.