King Krule is releasing a new album, Man Alive!, and has shared its first single, “(Don’t Let The Dragon) Draag On”.
Due out on February 21, Man Alive! is Archy Marshall’s third studio album as King Krule, and follows last year’s Hey World! EP of acoustic songs. It’s considerably more lean than 2017’s sprawling The Ooz, coming in at a shorter 40 minutes over just 14 tracks.
A press release describes the album as “a collection of snapshots and stories” that was partly recorded in Nunhead, south London, with Marshall playing most of the instruments himself (save for saxophone by Ignacio Salvadores). Half-way through the recording of Man Alive!, Marshall found out he was going to be a father, moved out of London for the north west of England, and recorded the rest of the album in Stockport. The press release stresses that the album still reflects Marshall pre-fatherhood.
“I feel better in life,” Marshall says in the press release. “I don’t drink or smoke when I’m in the north west, so I’m pretty clean. It’s made me kind of bored of what a lot of the album’s talking about! It’s hard to know where it’s going now I’ve done it, and what I’ll do next, because of my new-found role and responsibility in the world.”
The “(Don’t Let The Dragon) Draag On” video channels Marshall’s cinematic obsessions, pulling inspiration from Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc.
Man Alive! will be available on standard vinyl, limited edition white 12” vinyl, and an ‘indie edition’ with a bonus flexi-disc including the Hey World! version of “Perfecto Miserable”. King Krule will tour Europe and the US this spring to support it.
Watch the “(Don’t Let The Dragon) Draag On” video below.
