Archy Marshall (King Krule) Unearths Lost Single ‘When and Why’ and Announces Instrumental Edition of ‘A New Place 2 Drown’ via XL Recordings.
“His aesthetics and my aesthetics meet perfectly… we’ve grown up in the same place and naturally his eye is very similar to my eye.” A young Archy Marshall, better known as King Krule, says this about his brother Jack in a deep South London drawl in Will Robson-Scott’s documentary, A New Place 2 Drown. He sits hunched over in a camping chair in his family home, surrounded by leaning stacks of records, half-finished sketches and years of accumulated creativity stained on the walls like soot. The Marshall brothers’ South London upbringing is inescapable in every frame: the streets, the local green areas and the rain-soaked cityscapes permeate their work. This is the type of environment that the Marshall brothers grew up in, it feels less like a backdrop than a habitat: a lived-in ecosystem where the brothers’ artistic instincts were grown and cultivated naturally.
It’s within this intimate, hauntological space that ‘A New Place 2 Drown’, released under Archy’s real name, takes shape. Turning ten years old today, the project arrived not just as an album but alongside a book of Jack Marshall’s writing and artwork and a short film documenting their world. The creative work stands as a time capsule. It’s an artistic project pressed in the concrete, moss and the metallic tones of South London. Ten years on, it remains one of the most revealing artefacts in Archy Marshall’s catalogue, it’s a memento from the liminal space between teenage gloom and the expansive work that would follow. The album is a showcase of Archy Marshall’s producing abilities that reflected the textures of his environment itself instead of the post punk culture that existed in it, which he then went on to carve a uniquely recognisable sound in too. Fans return to it not for its polish but for the unguarded sincerity of feeling it carries, an atmosphere more than a narrative and the place it emulates more than the product.
The newly released instrumental version of ‘A New Place 2 Drown’, marking the tenth anniversary through XL Recordings, shifts the focus entirely onto Archy’s production craft. Stripped of vocals, other than the occasional ghostly echo of a sample, the album’s soundscape is foregrounded. Cavernous reverbs and haunted textures become even more immersive, letting the listeners navigate the melancholic beauty of what was once the Marshall brothers lived experiences through sonic architecture alone.
From the very first track, the album drips with nostalgia. ‘Any God Of Yours’ sounds like someone has left a tape recorder out on a semi busy street and returned hours later to find its contents compressed into a 1.5 minute haze. With its Burial-esque distortions, muffled drum-loops and damp, dissolving textures the track hums with a peculiar kind of longing, one characterised not by sentimentality but by urban desolation. It evokes a feeling of uncanny reminiscence – a longing for the past that turns into an unwelcome intrusion of the past into the present. As it trickles into the next track, ‘Swell’, you’re guided on a quiet walk through memory. A psychogeographic drift through the places that shaped Archy Marshall long before he knew they were shaping him, or perhaps he always knew. The albums ten year anniversary only heightens this reflective sense, offering a passage through adolescence.
If psychogeography is about the way a place imprints itself on a person, it explains the Marshall brothers’ creative alignment. They walked the same streets, breathed the same grey air and absorbed the same rumble of trains and distant sirens. I’ve spent time in that area myself, working in a local pub to where the Marshalls grew up. Years ago, Archy came in a few evenings from time to time, slipping into the room like a regular does. It was the kind of pub that smelled very faintly of spilt ales and wet raincoats with the gentle groan of the mini fridge scoring the shifts. There was something familiar about his presence, not because you knew who he was but because he seemed almost carved from that same urban sediment as the streets themselves. As he ordered a pint, he spoke in the same unhurried drawl as he did in Robson-Scott’s documentary, as though the areas rhythms resided permanently in his voice. Its in this mundanity, the smells, the noises and the buzz, that ‘A New Place 2 Drown’ seems to make perfect sense. Its not constructed, its lived.
Witnessing Archy Marshall there, inhabiting the same streets and rooms I’d spent my evenings in made me realise just how inseparable his music is from his environment. The brothers shared aesthetic isn’t a coincidence, it’s the natural result of a parallel drift through the same terrain. ‘Any God Of Yours’ captures this notion perfectly. It feels like a document of their unspoken language through which ideas pass silently from sibling to sibling. At risk of sounding too spiritual, it seems that the environment functioned almost like a third collaborator, an organism with its own moods. Psychogeography often speaks about the emotional charge of place but with the Marshalls, it becomes something closer to a feedback loop. The city impressed itself onto them and they in turn translated its frequencies back into art. The subterranean ambience bleeds through those soot covered bedroom walls, filtered unconsciously into their creative language. ‘A New Place 2 Drown’, as a multimedia creative project, sees the brothers become not just siblings but two receivers tuned to the same atmospheric signal.
What ‘A New Place 2 Drown‘ captures so effectively is something the cultural theorist Mark Fisher identified in Burial’s work: a form of hauntology. This is where music becomes a carrier of ghostly memory, of the not so long ago past and the dreariness of lost futures. Fisher found that Burial’s music embodied the spectral presence of past rave culture within modern loneliness using sounds like the crackling of vinyl and twisted samples to prompt a feeling that doesn’t quite fit with the current zeitgeist.
Heard through this lens, Marshall’s album reveals itself as part of a distinctly British lineage of urban melancholia rooted in the conditions of contemporary London. Marshall’s environment mirrors the conditions Fisher associated with a culture caught between exhaustion and persistence. The instrumental re-release only heightens this quality. Having no vocals to clarify meaning, the album feels like a sonic archive with its murmuring samples functioning as fragments of a recent past fading from view.
For Fisher, hauntological music mourns not only what has been lost but the futures that never arrived. Archy Mardhall’s album holds a similar tension. It was recorded at a threshold moment before adulthood and before success and it feels like it’s almost pre-emptively grieving a future whose shape is not clear. But maybe this was tied somehow to a fear of growing up and having to leave his ecosystem before he was ready. Much of King Krule’s later work moves away from this temporal drift, which could be a result of maturation. The uncertainty is replaced by a more grounded sense of self, suggesting that the hauntological ambience of ‘A New Place 2 Drown’ was tied to youthful moments rather than an artistic mode. In a way, this makes it more nostalgic to look back on ten years later, the feeling of this album a function of a very specific time and place, one that has almost remained trapped inside the record despite things and people moving on.
‘Eyes drift’ is one of the clearest examples of Marshall’s early production maturity, displaying a level of textural awareness far beyond his age at the time. Much of the album and its beats were recoded and programmed on an Akai MPC 2000xl, which provided the grainy soul of hip-hop classics made by artists like MF Doom and Madlib. The kick drum certainly has that unmistakable hip-hop weight, while the samples crackle with the nostalgic grit of something spun on a warped cassette. Electronic distortions bounce around the track as if Archy Marshal is trying to translate some strange urban frequencies picked up from a junction box or a flickering streetlight. There is a sense of the artist tuning into something hidden beneath the streets of South London’s surface noise, filtering signals through their outputs until they become recognisable as music. The results feel almost like a collage. ‘Eyes Drift’ sees Archy using production not just as a backdrop for songwriting but as its own language capable of evoking the physical textures of the world he grew up in.
Another highlight of the album is ‘Dull Boys’, the penultimate track. This one offers a new understanding of how environment embeds itself in Marshall’s work in a more lasting way. On the original album, this tracks last words were “she wont forget me forever”, which once seemed directed at a girl, making it more an artefact of adolescent melodrama. But a decade on it seems open to reinterpretation, especially as it is reintroduced as an instrumental. The “She” Marshall once referred to seems to expand beyond any singular persona, blurring into the wider presence of South London itself. Retrospectively, the line feels less like romantic yearning and more like a recognition that the city will not let him slip from memory. In many ways the city becomes the ex you never really break up with, a presence that lingers in your tone, in your phrases, in your entire palette. You remember the place in the same way most remember the past: imperfectly and selectively. But the city holds its own version of you in its memory. The instrumental version of ‘Dull Boys’ makes this apparent. Theres a feeling of reciprocity in the unspoken communication, the textures speak on the city’s behalf.
So, ten years on ‘A New Place 2 Drown’ is still glowing in a little corner of the King Krule universe. With its remastering and the first ever release of sought-after single, ‘When And Why’, fans now have more to explore from this pivotal era. Once a rain soaked dispatch from two scrappy South London lads, the album now reads like a blueprint for what Archy Marshall was to become. The instrumental version only solidifies what has been there this whole time – a producer nurturing an astonishing ability and a city quietly co-authoring each beat. This re-release asserts a truth that this album shows, you can grow up and leave the place that made you, but it never really leaves you. Through these instrumentals, South London gets the final word.
Listen/ Pre Order ‘A New Place 2 Drown (Instrumentals)’ here.
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