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2. He's been cosigned by Beyoncé.
Those familiar with both artists' musical styles might be surprised by this one. Queen Bee shouted out King Krule in a post back in 2013, when she directed her Facebook fans to "Easy Easy." Krule, for his part, was predictably relaxed about the news. “It doesn’t surprise me," he told MTV. "I think my music’s good.”
Even more surprising than the cosign itself, perhaps, is the fact that at the time, Krule didn't even have internet. "AÂ friend told me about it and I was thrilled," he explained. "It was really cool."
4. He went to an iconic British music school.
Recently, South London's BRIT School has been attended by some of Britain's great musical exports: Adele, Amy Winehouse, and Jessie J all studied there.
While King Krule might not be the next name that leaps to mind after those three, the school did convince him that not all academia is worthless. Before gaining admittance on the strength of the self-composed "Butterflies of Venus," young Archy Marshall really, really hated school—to the extent that his parents were almost fined for their son's ritual truancy.
Luckily, he warmed up to history and sociology while at the BRIT: "It's just a normal school that does specialized courses in creative things," he told The Guardian in 2011. Too true.
6. "Ramble On" was the first song he learned to play on guitar.
Aside from being an incredible song, Led Zeppelin's seminal hit is a great song to learn on guitar. Archy started playing at eight years old, and he told this painfully awkward interviewer that "Ramble On" was one of his first songs. The White Stripes were also in the mix.
8. They questioned his sanity as a child.
Administrators mistook Marshall's introversion for something neurological when he was a child. According to a 2013 interview with The Guardian, Marshall underwent a battery of tests for various mental illnesses at London's Maudsley Hospital.
"That really took its toll on me," the singer said. "It was then I decided to not give a shit about the establishment, because a lot of the time, the doctors and the psychiatrists and the counsellors and my social workers were plain wrong. Basically, I hated everyone."
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10. King Krule is Archy Marshall is Edgar the Beatmaker.
He was Zoo Kid before he was King Krule, but Archy Marshall has had a number of aliases. There was DJ JD Sports, and he makes beats and writes rhymes as Edgar the Beatmaker.
He's released two EPs as Edgar: Darkest Shades of Blue and Baby London, both released in 2013. Spoiler: they're fire.
11. Chronic insomnia helped him pursue music.
A lifelong battle with insomnia forced Marshall to spend his nights with music. When sleep didn't come, he would thrown on his grandmother's Sennheiser headphones and dive deep into The Pixies and The Libertines. "That was when I began to think about creating soundscapes," he told The Guardian.
When he did sleep, it was thanks to "relaxing bits" of classical music. Marshall would loop a specific section in search of unconsciousness, telling Pitchfork in 2013, "When I was younger... I would hear a part of a song that would really relax me and then put it on repeat. That would send me to sleep. It was quite obvious classical music, people like Penguin Café Orchestra, Erik Satie, Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel."
13. Outkast lyrics piss him off (because they're so good).
Have you ever loved a song so much it makes you mad? Music can overtake your body with a special kind of loving jealousy, one that Marshall identified in a 2013 interview with Pitchfork.
"Sometimes I’ll listen to a lyric and I’ll be so pissed off that I didn’t write it," he said. Pressed for an example, Marshall pointed to André 3000 and Big Boi: "Every Outkast track. That’s the shit. And there’s this one track, 'When Your Lover Has Gone'—I think it comes from a musical—but the Four Freshman did it in 1959. That version of the song is really something I wish I’d wrote."
15. He's a graffiti artist.
Archy Marshall's visual art is a big part of his creative output. "It is an expression in and of itself... you're risking something too, you're risking getting caught," he told The Fader. "There's also the expressive side of it to, just putting something on a wall."
Growing up, his childhood room was "completely covered with graffiti tags everywhere," according to a conversation with Interview. "Ceiling and everything. I used to write on my walls all the time when I was growing up.
By the same token, he's also a big fan of writing by hand, once telling Noisey his preferred way of getting ideas was to ideas of is to "scribble it out."
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16. For years of his life, he didn't want to leave his bed.
17. It's all in the family.
Marshall's brother Jack is the principal collaborator on A New Place 2 Drown, but Marshall's whole family has the art bug.
Both parents play instruments when they're not at equally creative day jobs (his mother is a screen printer, Dad is an art director). Marshall's uncle was a longtime guitarist for the ska band Top Cats, and his godfather played with English punk-reggae legends The Ruts.
