Eight years of The Ooz

Eight years ago, on 13 October 2017, UK singer-songwriter Archy Marshall, famously known by his alias King Krule, released his second studio album, and what would later become the closest piece of music to my heart, The Ooz.

To call The Ooz a masterpiece would be doing it a disservice. In fact, any title pales in comparison to what Archy created here. This isn't a mere album; it is an experience larger than life itself, one that merges the walls between our world and Archy's world, one where you're drowning and floating simultaneously, and one that will outlive us all. So until human language can decide on the right term for such a thing, words like masterpiece will have to do for now.

The Ooz is nineteen songs and sixty-six minutes long, yet despite how long its runtime seems, it does not feel tedious or rushed. It progresses as any story but surpasses them all in doing so. The album takes place at night and slowly unravels a single thread of isolation, loneliness, and unease. This thread then turns into a path that Archy must navigate during his darkest times. Love, loss, heartbreak, confusion, and depression are the album's central struggles, and it calls on both the artist and the listeners to confront them together.

I seem to sink lower

Archy starts his magnum opus with Biscuit Town. This classic Hollywood-esque opener sets the tone we're about to delve into and introduces our lone wolf hero, in the darkest of pubs, deep inside the alleys at the heart of Bermondsey, London, drowning in his own drinks and thoughts. The air is thick with the stench of spilt beer and stale cigarettes, and a dim light is flickering above him. His glass, half empty, sweats in the grip of his hand, as he mutters incoherent truths to no one but us, the listeners, over a stuttering trip-hop drumline.

Plagued by our brains

The air grows heavier and thicker as a new rhythm begins to take hold. The Locomotive roars to life, its steady, mechanical pulse pulling King Krule from his haze into something much larger. The shift is subtle but undeniable, as his eyes carry a shy glint of anger, slowly gaining momentum and fixated ahead, chasing something that lies beyond the horizon.

Some things won't change for a while

The momentum of the journey falters as Dum Surfer kicks in. The steady rhythm of the tracks is replaced by something wilder and more violent. The world around him is blurry, and the buildings are mushed together. Archy’s voice is now cracking and stumbling in the disarray of his thoughts, bouncing between clarity and confusion, as he tries to give us an immersive look at the everyday misery he chooses to go through, over the skeletal backbone of a clattering jazz-rock rhythm. By the time the car crashes at the end of this song, the storm has passed, and King Krule is getting ready to face the consequences.

Nothing is working with me

If Dum Surfer is the chaos of the crash, then Slush Puppy is the realisation that there is no escaping this Sisyphean suffering. Archy seems to be giving up to the ghost of a past romance, swaying back and forth in front of him like a ghost and taunting him with the temptation of toxic love. His voice is bleeding with pain and hopelessness, while the distorted, sluggish instrumentation mirrors his defeat perfectly. There is no solution, no closure, and this romance dies as it once lived, in a festering pit, oozing with corrosive hopelessness. This track is perhaps the lowest Archy has ever been in his entire catalogue.

A solas pero rodeado

The first chapter of the Bermondsey Bottom duology gently sponges up the lingering sorrow. The true intention of this interlude is yet to be revealed. Though cryptic to most, Spanish poetry carries a peculiar warmth, a glimmer of hope in a language just beyond grasp. Pairing with the enthralling background music, it carves out a pocket of respite.

Reflection taunts my empty soul

Just as the dust starts settling, comes another wave of muddy waters in Logos, stirring up the remnants of past memories, particularly those tainted by a strained relationship with his mother. The melody is subdued but relentless, and Archy's voice drifts closer to spoken word than song, wavering between longing and resentment, to what seems like a depressing and wasted childhood.

I was made for sublunary

Archy's first breath after surviving the initial tides of the Ooz and managing to stay afloat above it comes in Sublunary, as he loses himself in a smoky haze of abstract jazz, wallowing under the light of a celestial body far up ahead in the dark sky. Such a fitting symbol for Archy's state at the moment, a light so comforting in mind's eye, yet impossibly far to reach.

Lover, come back to me

Another crushing epiphany strikes Archy out of left field in Lonely Blue, sweeping away what little optimism we had up until now with its submerged ambience and suffocating art rock. King Krule is so physically and mentally gone that even what was once the baby blue he sang about can’t save him anymore. The state he reaches is too alien to capture in language, but the sounds provide an accurate silhouette of that feeling. His voice slows to a slur by the end, perhaps giving in to the death threats of the depressive quicksand of the Ooz. It seems like the easy way out at this point.

Lost to where I belong

As Archy drowns deep into a pit of pitch-black tar, the figure of a mesmerising woman appears before him, flickering between salvation and torment. Cadet Limbo unravels like a desperate hallucination. Archy’s lyrics reflect a longing for a bond lost to time and space, as “Has it been this long?” loops like a mantra, capturing his deep yearning and sense of disconnection. The ethereal jazz passage mirrors this emotional limbo. This waltzing spacey interlude feels exactly how it sounds, suspended between drifting and drowning, caught in the echoes of a love that seems forever out of reach.

These pills just make me drool

Through the thick haze comes Emergency Blimp, tearing through with heavy post-punk distorted guitar riffs, leaving a trail of agony and paranoia, much like the jet trail on the album cover. Archy is unable to sleep off the passing of the Ooz, and every pill he takes only injects a fresh vision of all-too-realistic horror into the brains of his listeners

I need a place to hide

The madness is cooled down as Czech One drifts glides in, offering us a temporary reprieve from the Ooz's suffocating grip. Archy's voice, barely more than a whisper, trembles over sparse keys and faint lounge-like textures, as if he's trying to soothe himself and us into believing that he's not falling apart, a feeling best portrayed by the music video of this song, where Archy is having a fever dream of transitions between shades of blue and airplanes and bleak road streetlight, isolated and disconnected from the people around him.

How can I be feeling the same as you

King Krule wakes up from that dream, in a cold sweat of clear blood and stray saliva, unsure of what has taken place and what was just a premonition of what is yet to come. The sleeping pills on the table look like psychedelics through the din and disharmonious rhythm that comes crashing through the curtains at the end of A Slide In (New Drugs), perhaps, the ooz is getting closer, and we don't have much time left.

And my eyes are so forlorn, but her eyes are so full on

As the inevitable gets closer, Archy is reaching unstable highs of manic energy that put its predecessor in the burning fields of punk to shame. His voice is as raw and as unhinged as ever on Vidual, teetering between anger and desperation as he grapples with the weight of his own existence. He can't even trust himself anymore, nor should he.

Six feet beneath the moon

Amid all of this chaos, the second chapter of Bermondsey Bottom arrives to give Archy and everyone following his journey yet another much-needed pocket of relief. This chapter is hopelessly hypnotic, an antidote to all ailments that bears repeating in times of psychological catastrophe.

I've only got two fighting hands

The walls of momentary tranquillity collapse with no warning, as we find ourselves on a makeshift raft sailing in the dark, across a storm-tossed sea, under the flashes of lightning and a sky with no stars. On Half Man Half Shark, Archy is facing the storm head-on, going all out with nothing but a dose of adrenaline, jagged guitars, pounding drums, angry snarls and aggressive growls. This is his final attempt to force his way out of this madness, to embrace the darkness within him, but to no avail, as the shaft breaks around the end of the song. Archy is drowning once again, but this time, with no strength or will to swim back up.

Paradise of leeches

To understand the depths of depression captured within The Ooz, you'd have to experience and digest the entire thing, yet The Cadet Leaps serves as an excellent teaser for it. As the soothing yet skin-crawling sound of the rain sets in, there are chimes of voiceless weeping, twitching, and lurching forward, sounding like a broken machine trying to stay alive, while Archy's voice, barely audible, flickers between clarity and delirium. This journey has been painstaking, even harrowing at times, but it is also a beautifully honest look at human life. The Cadet Leaps marks the beginning of the end, and this is simultaneously happy and sad.

Is anybody out there?

At the pinnacle of this journey, your own interpretation of it does not matter anymore; there is no room for imagination. Whether you're living this journey in the dark alleys of London or deep down in the bottom of the ocean, once the title track of The Ooz floats into view, tears can no longer be contained. Torment and despair bear down on both the listeners and Archy, who is wandering aimlessly in a state of limbo, crying out with a broken voice for a lover who will never come. Perhaps the most crushing element of this song, and this entire album as a whole, is the fact that love is not an impossibility for King Krule, or at least the character that he plays in this dark blue biopic of devastating hardship. It is the distress of being forever lost in this mental maze that turns romance into a ghost, never to cross paths with the one man who could bring it back to life.

Things are even, but don't even out

Deep Sea diver is a penultimate milestone in the quagmire of the Ooz, where, for the first time, Archy stops resisting; he stops trying to swim back to the surface and allows himself to be pulled under. The scabs that criss-cross King Krule's arms are starting to heal in this existential crisis of deceptively catchy dark jazz, but there are countless scars left across his memory and mind. As our protagonist looks back on his journey, bargaining with the phantom of a previous lover who left him, and pondering the pros and cons of sinking to the bottom of his subaqueous depression, the album prepares its final statement.

I crave ways to dry

On the final track, La Lune, King Krule opens his eyes and finds himself washed ashore, his hair is wet, and his clothes are still damp from his violent journey. It's almost dawn, and the blessed moon above is visible for brief moments before slinking away into the shadowless shine of the day. The sun rises over and applauds King Krule for surviving. A final pang of melancholy settles over this shift in scenery, as our protagonist makes peace with his lonely life and reflects on all the things that led him to this point. He pushes himself upright, brushing the sand from his clothes, and takes one last look at the infinite horizon of the daunting ocean, accepting his powerlessness before the monsters it harbours, and that he must look for ways to stay dry as long as he can. The Ooz takes a bow and fades from view with one last serene solution of rain, having altered the lives of its audiences forever.

And while this journey is one interpretation, the truth is that there is no end to the meanings and conclusions one can draw from the nineteen-sided polygon of the Ooz. Like a Rubik's Cube with no true answer, this album is a work of art that will mystify and fascinate for decades to come. It transcends the status of sound alone, and no number of genres mashed together can truly describe its texture. Archy Marshall immersed himself in the deepest and darkest of oceans, sat under the heaviest of rains, and roamed through the densest of fogs to record this seamless saga, and every ounce of sweat, blood, and tears that went into its creation can be felt in what is arguably the most unique musical atmosphere in existence.

This album is beyond a simple character study, delving so deeply into the splintered psyche of Archy Marshall that to call the main character of this complex plot a mere persona would be a grave misnomer. Flanked on all sides by doubting voices and graphic memories of unimaginable heartbreak, our lone hero, as well as everyone else listening carefully, suffers multiple deaths of the spirit and only manages to make it out with his body intact. What began within the clamorous sound of Archy's thoughts ends in the most bittersweet and transformative of circumstances, striking listeners with the understanding that they have just witnessed a masterpiece, for lack of a better word.

Almost every album offers up a world of its own, but none are as deeply engaging as The Ooz. While this album was born within the dark alleys of London, its story feels universal, reaching you even as you sit in the warmth of your room, rain tapping against your windows, just as it is for me right now. Lovelorn loneliness and a search to regain the spirit, domestic despondency and a dream to find peace under the light of the moon, King Krule is the voice of ageless wisdom through it all, and his sixty-six-minute will live on wherever there is a need for sympathy.

As I reach the end of this article, I recall the music video for Czech One, where Archy is sitting in front of an airplane window, the outside is unnaturally blue, and the inside is unnaturally dark. Every single thing that makes the nineteen songs of the Ooz so potent, crammed into a four-minute and eighteen-second fever dream of transition between shades of blue, bleak roads and streetlights, ghosts of the past, and this suffocating feeling of isolation even in the most crowded places, perhaps, that is what the Ooz looks like.

It's cold by the fire.