It’s impossible to imagine this isn’t deliberate – after all, how better to convey jaded ennui than through a sense of familiar repetition? But this can feel like a weakness too by the end of the album, the slow beats begin to feel inert and the foggy production turns monochrome. At the same time, it’s an unevolving sound palette – there’s no sense of risk or development over its length. Marshall’s jazz background shows in some unexpected chord progressions, and its murky swirl is hypnotic and disorientating. Over its forty minutes, the tempo is consistently glacial and the pads misty and deep. It’s the same joyless language of post-punk, familiar territory for the cynical outgrowing the last shackles of adolescence.īut A New Place 2 Drown is startling in how it sounds. Lyrical fragments flow in and out of focus, but the general gist revolves around the acknowledgement of the unfulfilling grind of everyday life. Not that there’s any sense of bravado or machismo to be found – frustration has been replaced by bitter acceptance, a sense of powerlessness and futility. The confrontational harshness of 6 Feet sometimes felt a little contrived, the sound of a young man desperate to shape the world to his view, whereas A New Place 2 Drown is arch in an unshowy way.

The influence of cloud rap looms heavily, but it’s a subdued, soft interpretation. The lyrics are not quite spoken, not quite rapped – it’s almost beat poetry, but without the connotations of earnestness implied. Marshall’s voice is still the same: older than his years, a guttural growl which is uncompromisingly flat but there’s none of the strained hollering that shaped 6 Feet. The awkward rhythms and gloomy introspection hark back to the heyday of trip-hop, but there’s no gloss or finesse on anything here. Instead, A New Place 2 Drown is rooted in electronica and hip-hop, a mix of gauzy grey synths and slow, stark beats. There’s none of the post-punk guitar that anchored the King Krule album 6 Feet Beneath The Moon. A New Place 2 Drown is Marshall’s first release under his real name (his second album proper) and in many ways it represents a synthesis of his career to date. But Marshall’s work has always been characterised by the same feature: namely, an overarching sense of melancholy and resignation. They’re all pseudonyms used by Archy Marshall at various points in his career, separating genre adventures and production experiments.

Archy marshall a new place to drown