King Krule sinks deeper and deeper 
on his third full-length, ‘The OOZ’

London is a melting pot, sure, but 
Peckham is something else. There 
are Nigerian fashion retailers mixed 
with Jamaican chicken shacks; 
down the road there are cult-like 
gatherings where British youth 
reminisce about the days before 
CCTV monitored the top deck of 
buses. It’s a bizarre place, and a 
fitting home for Archy Marshall — 
a scraggly white kid with red hair, 
who cites J Dilla and Fela Kuti with 
equal reverence. 
Archy’s broad range of influences 
lends itself naturally to his scattered 
musical identity. His most acclaimed 
work is as King Krule, the enigmatic 
guitarist we haven’t seen since 2013, 
but he’s also Edgar The Beatmaker 
(Soundcloud producer), DJ JD 
Sports (Macbook rapper), Zoo Kid 
(depressed high schooler) and of 
course Archy Marshall (so far, a lo-fi 
cloud rapper).
His latest effort as King Krule, 
The OOZ, is largely characterized 
by the radio silence that preceded it. 
Since we’ve last seen him, he’s aged, 
fallen in and out of love, rapped with 
rappers and smoked in his ever-
changing native Peckham. On “A 
Slide (In New Drugs)” he quips “The 
cityscape, bourgeoisie change to 
replicate / How can I be feeling the 
same as you?”
It’s been four years, but he’s by 

and large the same as he once was. 
Where on 6 Feet Beneath The Moon 
Archy would yell at the sky, The 
OOZ sees him kick rocks through a 
cloud of smoke. While the years have 
certainly eroded the more explosive 
musical tendencies of his youth, the 
album features some of his clearest 
and sharpest songwriting to date.
At 17 he already had the 
perspective of a twice-divorced 
man, but now at 23, the pool of 
experience he draws from has 
grown even more burdensome. The 
album is his best attempt at letting 
it out, or perhaps letting us in, and 
while it’s not exactly a “happy place,” 
the incessant “ooz” of day-to-day 
life presents a challenge you simply 
learn to get on with.
On album-opener “Biscuit Town,” 
he rhymes “Gianfranco Zola” with 
“I think she thinks I’m bipolar”; his 
thoughts dart through his South 
London upbringing on inhale and 
move to relationships on exhale.
At times it’s hard to tell if his 
intense ruminations are really just 
melodramatic grouses. On “Vidual” 
he grumbles “I put my trust in many 
things but now I know that’s dumb 
/ So I don’t trust anyone, only get 
along with some / Saw that girl again 
one time and now I know it’s done”. 
It’s all just a bit passé for a 23 year old.
There are a lot of these soft 
murmurs on this album, but for the 
first time, there’s some absolute 
belting too, as we’d seen earlier this 

year on Mount Kimbie’s “Blue Train 
Lines.” At first pass it’s difficult to 
make sense of him screaming “I wish 
I was people!” on “Locomotive,” 
but honestly, when shit goes pear-
shaped, wouldn’t you love to be 
“people,” too? Other brash instances, 
like his “Half man with a body of 
a shark” chant (16 times over), are 
slightly more bewildering.
Archy front-loads most of the 
album’s flashpoints, like a guitar 
solo on “Dum Surfer” that sounds 
like you’re hearing it for the first 
time, every time. Later in the song he 
conjures imagery of him puking on 
the sidewalk before getting in a cab 
with a Slovakian girl.
Though “Dum Surfer” is his only 
“night out” on the album, most of the 
songs take place on nights where the 
darkness just swallows him whole. 
It’s less lad culture debauchery 
and more anxious rambling about 
relationships, family and self-doubt.
“Logos” for example, would not 
have been so out of place on Frank 
Ocean’s Endless (it’s similar in 
that way to his fantastic EP, A New 
Place 2 Drown). “I call my mum / 
She stumbles home / Through open 
ground / Back to broken homes” 
sounds like it’s being recited while 
sinking into his couch. Sonically, the 
song deviates from his traditional 
synth 
and 
guitar 
composition, 
adding elements of jazz he’s cited but 
never quite recreated until now.
That sinking feeling never leaves 

The OOZ, and the only thing that 
oscillates over the course of the 
album is his willingness to reach for 
others. Much of the album is about 
finding out if what you need is time 
alone or more time with someone 
else.
The drunk keys of “Czech One” 
bring with them the centerpiece of 
the album — a woozy song of lust, 
isolation and directionless passing of 
time. “She asked me why I’m here / 
But I come here every night / Do you 
need to tell her something? / No, I 
need a place to write”. In one verse, 
he “drown[s] too quick,” “fade[s] out 
of sight” and yet, “he still search[es] 
for warmth.”
In the music video, for a moment, 
he actually levitates over the 
pavement of Bermondsey; in a way, 
that’s what he’s been doing for the 
past five years. He’s always been 
floating in the middle, somewhere 
in-between. He’s five aliases at 
once. He’s “half man half shark,” 
half where he wants to be and half 
crumbling, physically present but 
mentally disintegrating.
The OOZ makes you question if it’s 
even worth getting up. It obscures 
what you think you know, because 
sometimes those downward spirals 
are just harsh realities you’d rather 
not believe. Sometimes it isn’t too 
bad to be true though — it’s just plain 
true. The OOZ is what lures you 
further into the couch. Sometimes 
that’s just where you need to be.

St. Vincent straddles coastal 
style in hot pink heeled boots

St. Vincent is a fabrication. 
It’s a creation slowly built and 
carved by Annie Clark, a project 
that came to resemble a human 
but wasn’t entirely meant to 
be. The name itself suggests 
the unreal, like the abstraction 
taken from an icon, a wistful 
sense of the holy that never was 
and isn’t still. That it’s Annie’s 
face which graces the cover of 
over half St. Vincent’s studio 
albums is beside the point: 
They share the same face, 
but St. Vincent is the image, 
Annie the person. Clark likes 
to play with that line between 
the persona and the person, 
but no matter how sweetly 
she has danced between the 
two, she still makes it known 
that it’s a performance. That 
creation has been her appeal 
to universality, and her Chloes 
and Johnnys, her “You”s and 
“I”s are all characters in this 
world building. 
On 
MASSEDUCTION, 
her fifth album, the tension 
between Annie and St. Vincent 
dominates. It means everything 
and still it’s more unclear than 
ever before. That’s St. Vincent 
on 
stage 
bemoaning 
the 
seduction of the masses. There’s 
the created image fearing the 
future. And yet, when we move 
beyond the plastic surgery she 
both mocks coyly and wears 
herself, there’s an unflagging 
clarity that feels new.
Never 
has 
she 
made 
a 
song like “New York.” Never 
has she felt so naked; never 
has 
her 
songwriting 
been 
so simply beautiful, so free 
of alien metaphor, straight-
talking 
yet 
poetic 
all 
the 
same. Here, she sings to a 
friend about definitions, about 
what a city means when those 
who made it everything are 
gone. Loss is consuming on 
MASSEDUCTION.
“New York” is the heart of 
this album, and so is the city. 
This is an album of love within 
a disease — within powerful 
addictions 
and 
temptations 
that rip people apart. And when 
she’s talking about love, she’s 
talking about New York. Her 
relationships mold that city, 
and when she walks through 
Time Square with her friend in 
“Happy Birthday, Johnny,” the 
loss she feels in the tear of that 
friendship is inexorably tied to 
those buildings. She sings him 
happy New Year and the ball 
drops for them both, far apart 
as they may be.
When she’s on the other 

coast, 
she’s 
singing 
about 
longing too, but it’s more lustful 
there, and a bit cheeky. On “Los 
Ageless,” 
she’s 
grinning 
at 
the superficial desires of that 
city. It’s a story of wants in 
Hollywood, this dying yearn for 
youthful perfection that will 
forever remain unattainable: 
“How can anybody have you? 
/ How can anybody have you 
and lose you?” That song and 
that city are a degree separated 
from 
reality. 
Los 
Ageless 
isn’t a place, and whoever or 
whatever you take the “you” 
as, it’s gone regardless. Like 
that illusion, the song itself 
is overly concocted, complete 
with the ’80s drum pattern 

and synths signature of pop 
producer Jack Antonoff, who 
co-produced this album. This 
formula appears all throughout 
MASSEDUCTION, and it can 
be relentless in its forced smile. 
Of course that’s the point, 
but it can make for a less than 
gratifying listen. “Los Ageless” 
never really goes anywhere. It 
hardly wavers from the straight 
line laid out by its chorus.
We can read the tension 
between St. Vincent and Annie 
Clark 
through 
the 
tension 
between the two coasts, and this 
album rides these two modes: 
She alternates between the 
plastic of San Bernardino and 
the wrought confessional of the 
concrete jungle. Loneliness and 
loss move between these coasts, 
certainly, but the separation 
between the cities defines how 
she processes these feelings. In 
New York she looks inwards; in 
Los Angeles she looks outwards 
(and 
isn’t 
too 
impressed). 
MASSEDUCTION is very much 
about flying between them.

The stretch from “Pills” 
to “Los Ageless” is that West 
coast concern for the outward. 
The seductions she tackles 
are broader and more of the 
masses, as the album title 
suggests. 
There 
aren’t 
the 
hyper-specific moments we get 
on the tracks about New York, 
like that hotel room where 
Johnny lights up his Bic lighter 
in “Happy Birthday, Johnny.” 
Instead we have abstractions; 
in the title track she sings of 
“A punk rock romantic” and 
“Nuns in stress position.” On 
“Pills,” she dances to a chipper 
club beat while describing a 
pill-induced haze that could 
be anyone’s. She sounds almost 
celebratory, and she gets away 
with it because she’s right there 
in it too, seduced by the drugs 
and technology herself. She 
avoids what easily could have 
been a gratingly haughty tone.
This slew of songs is the 
most upbeat on the album, 
and St. Vincent hardly lets up 
the guise. They’re interesting 
thought experiments, but they 
can grow a bit tiresome as they 
push farther in the album, 
almost 
monotonous. 
When 
that sound reappears as late as 
“Fear the Future,” it’s nearly 
exhausting. It’s what makes 
those New York tracks so 
stunning, such breaths of fresh 
air among all the sickness.
For a while we’re not sure 
whether the two sides of this 
album will ever truly meet: 
drug- and sex- fueled nights 
lead into confessionals without 
a clear sense of narrative. It’s 
not until the end that we see 
MASSEDUCTION as a single 
story, on the closing track, 
“Smoking Section.” The song is 
an absolute triumph. It brings 
the unresolved ends to light, and 
the apparent contradictions are 
explained. St. Vincent draws a 
sketch of someone on the edge, 
someone who sees how easily it 
could all burst into flames and 
kind of likes it, maybe wants 
it to happen. “Let it happen,” 
she sings. And yet she doesn’t. 
By the end she decides, “It’s 
not the end,” though it very 
well could have been. The 
track moves slowly, explodes, 
recoils and does it all over, like 
the turns this album makes 
track by track. It’s a glam rock 
ballad about pop suicide, which 
she contemplates like a dark 
game on her stage, waiting for 
someone to light her up. But she 
doesn’t want to step over that 
edge. She stays behind it, toying 
with 
her 
own 
destruction, 
reveling in the seduction all the 
same.

With ‘Virtue,’ Casablancas 
looks back (but not in anger)

I was fooled by “Leave it In My 
Dreams,” the first single off The 
Voidz’s sophomore effort, Virtue. 
I thought this was going to be a 
Strokes album. The muted riffs 
and sharp lyrics sound like an 
Angles bonus track.
But this is not a Strokes album, 
and it’s not exactly an album 
either. Virtue feels, instead, like a 
collection of everything frontman 
Julian Casablancas couldn’t do 
with that aforementioned band. 
It’s an outpouring of musical 
frustration.
It’s a mess, one that isn’t well 
served by determinations of 
“good” or “bad.” Some tracks 
excel, others confuse, but Virtue 
isn’t the sum of its unbalanced 
parts.
And 
Casablancas 
would 
probably love that designation. 
After 
his 
bonkers 
interview 
with Vulture, we know he’s a 
man whose steadfast ideologies 
are all but completely removed 
from reality. He’s easy to confuse 
with a certain love interest from 
a certain best picture nominee. 
Yes, that’s right. L’Enfance Nue 
is older, but in no way grown up.
And the Julian/Kyle parallel 
has never been more apparent 
than on Virtue. “I was soon sent 
off to school / Where the teachers 
gave me poison / And I drank it 
like a fool,” Casablancas sings 
on “Think Before You Drink, ” 
a track sonically reminiscent of 
“I’ll Try Anything Once.” He’s 
rightfully preoccupied with the 
world’s suffering and decay, but 

hasn’t yet grown out of seeing 
himself at its center.
On “Lazy Boy” — a song that 
lyrically could’ve been written 
by that one band from your 
high school (see previous “Lady 
Bird” reference) — Casablancas 
sings: “Jackets are the eyes 
to the soul,” proving he can 
actually 
be 
self 
reflective. 
Casablanca’s rebranding of a 
specific downtown cool for the 
new millennium cemented The 
Strokes in the visual cultural 
memory. He seems, here, to be 
trying to reconcile his desire 
for musical recognition and his 
wholehearted 
condemnation 
of 
music 
the 
world 
deems 
“popular.” It’s a true Catch-22 
for Julian: Fame is for frauds 
and obsolescence is for the 
untalented.
For brief moments — “Leave it 
in My Dreams” and “All Wordz 
Are Made Up” — Virtue sees 
the Voidz letting go, leaning 
wholeheartedly into a kind of 
joyful existentialism. Nothing 
matters! Isn’t that sort of fun? 
“No one will care about this in 10 
years,” he sings on “All Wordz Are 
Made Up,” in another moment 
of self awareness. He seems to 
understand the shelf life of his 
specific celebrity brand, and his 
precarious position in popular 
culture. But these tracks lack the 
self-lamentation found in other 
corners of the album. They’re, 
even 
if 
only 
momentarily, 
carefree in their nihilism.
Virtue is an operation in 
nostalgia that tries to front as 
forward thinking. Casablancas 
got slammed for rewriting the 

’70s with The Strokes. With The 
Voidz, he’s moved his musical 
homage a decade into the future — 
mining the ’80s in all their synth-
filled, vocally distorted glory. In 
that sense, Virtue is progressive 
for an artist obsessed with the 
past. But it’s not progressive for 
2018, not really.
Casablancas isn’t looking into 
the future at all. In many ways, 
Virtue feels like a last ditch effort 
— one final shot to get all the 
things in his head into an album. 
In a move that leans more towards 
a mixtape than a cohesive album, 
the Voidz bounce from art rock to 
synth pop to a weird attempt at 
metal (the aptly titled “Pyramid 
of Bones”). It’s as disjointed as it 
is unbalanced. But, as we know, 
when Casablancas is on, he’s on 
and when he’s not, he’s so earnest 
in his attempt that you can’t help 
but applaud it.
For moments he feels jaded 
in his surrender to middle age. 
While 
his 
primary 
business 
has 
always 
been 
nostalgia, 
Casablancas seems to be looking 
back on his own life: his youth, his 
angst, his glory. And it’s hard to 
blame him, The Strokes rocked. 
So we can revel in this mess of an 
album a little longer than most, 
cut it’s chaos more slack than 
we otherwise would. Virtue is 
exactly what we knew would 
happen when Julian Casablancas 
had to finally grow up.
There are very few things I 
know to be absolute truths but 
among them are these: New York 
rock isn’t dead yet and Julian 
Casablancas is no longer it’s 
savior. And maybe he never was.

MADELEINE GAUDIN
Managing Arts Editor

SHAYAN SHAFII
Daily Arts Writer

MATT GALLATIN
Daily Arts Writer

Loneliness 
and loss move 
between these 
coasts, certainly, 
but the separation 
 
defines how she 
processes these 
feelings.

RCA

XL

2D — Fall 2018
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

