King Krule Returns with Man Alive!, His First Truly Great Record from Front to Back
Archy Marshall’s third album as King Krule would make a cubist proud

One of the hallmarks of Carl Theodor Dreyer’s landmark 1928 silent film The Passion of Joan of Arc is its use of extreme close-ups. Individual facial features—the left eye, a chin, a single set of freckles—are shot with uncanny depth from canted angles, spiritualizing a saint from some perspectives and indicting a heretic in others. The film is regarded as an early example of cubist filmmaking, and rightfully so: Everything about it just feels italicized.
When King Krule recently cited The Passion of Joan of Arc as an influence on his new album, something clicked. A career-long pattern asserted itself: The artist born Archy Marshall has been trying to make cubist music. Man Alive!, the latest from the brooding Londoner, sounds like an attempt to clarify that; the sonics throughout are malleable and the perspectives are all over the place, but there’s an undeniable—and undeniably unnerving—unity to the album’s composure. Recontextualizing the best elements (and, arguably, the unfulfilled promises) of his discography in a finally-defined voice, Marshall has made his first truly great record from front to back.
There’s a certain flattening effect to Man Alive!, pulling unique sounds and ideas from each of Marshall’s past records and smashing their perspectives together. Where each of Marshall’s previous albums was marred by their indulgence, Man Alive! is acerbic in its density, elegantly moving between the guitar-forward production of King Krule’s 2013’s debut 6 Feet Beneath The Moon and the left field-leaning abstractions of its 2017 follow-up, The Ooz. (There’s even room for the trip-hop inclinations of 2015’s A New Place 2 Drown, quietly released under Marshall’s own name, on Man Alive!’s best song, “Stoned Again.”) Each previous album over-committed to their individual soundscape, but the coherence of and play between all of King Krule’s styles on Man Alive! would make a cubist proud.