Closes the Space Between Human and Non‑Human Animal

For many viewers, the images of smiling puppies bounding around a playground in King Krule’s most recent video clip would have come as a surprise. This is understandable, as the multi-disciplinary artist is best known for his desolate and dubby compositions that capture the sublime bleakness of his native South-East London and, more universally, the acute malaise of the internet age. But Archy Marshall is now a father, and his most recent release seems to embody the transformations in worldview that inevitably accompany such a seismic change in one’s personal life. Directed by Jocelyn Anquetil (Alone, Omen 3), the videoclip for Seaforth, the leading single from Marshall’s forthcoming album Space Heavy, is in many ways a movement away from the gothic, inner-city imagery that has defined Marshall’s aesthetic his entire career.

Marshall’s videoclips have traditionally contained allusions to classic horror films by directors such as Alfred Hitchcock (Psycho/The Birds), James Whale (Frankenstein), and Richard Donner (The Omen). In the videoclip for ‘Comet Face’, Marshall prowls around an 18^th century Peckham Rye as a werewolf. In ‘Dum Surfer’, Marshall and his band are pale-faced zombies performing at a seedy dive-bar, in ‘(Don't Let The Dragon) Draag On’, he is burned alive at the stake; and in ‘Biscuit Town’, he becomes a giant, Godzilla-like creature stumbling intoxicated through a smoky metropolis. In all videos, whether depicted as a blood-thirsty beast, a warlock, or the walking dead, Marshall is not fully human but hybrid, abject and monstrous (see The Ooz’s ‘Half Man Half Shark’). This Kafkaesque metamorphosis is still present in ‘Seaforth’, but instead of a mutant beast, Archy is likened to a goofy golden retriever.

The video clip begins with flashes of people and animals sleeping. The lo-fi footage, accompanied by a dreamy, languid instrumental, is reminiscent of the videoclip for ‘Czech One’ (which, for me, is Marshall’s magnum opus). After Marshall wakes on a beach and witnesses a woman made of sand collapsing in the wind, the remainder of the clip follows Marshall as a dorky, dad-like character attempting to find his dog. Through the use of cross-dissolves on multiple occasions Marshall is also compared to the orange-furred animal. As the narrative unfolds, it becomes clear that the golden retriever has absconded with a Labrador puppy to frolic through parks and playgrounds before catching the train to Seaforth to share a meal in a beachside café. While these images are undeniably funny and cute, there are multiple deeper meanings beneath the surface. Indeed, the dog and puppy could potentially represent Marshall and his baby daughter spending a day together, but the video is not simply using animals as symbolic representations for human subjects; there is something much more complex and symbiotic at work here.

When Marshall sings the chorus, ‘I see you, the same eyes...', the camera zooms into a portrait shot of the golden retriever, who is staring straight back into the lens. This is arguably the most moving image of the clip, as it engenders what critical animal theorists would refer to as a profound interspecies encounter. These moments of human-animal communion, along with the explicit allusions to climate change (‘We soar above the broken Earth [...] We sit and watch the planet dyin' up above’), suggest that Marshall is not simply singing about the void between two lovers but about the space that has been placed between human and animal. The up-close shots of the dogs’ eyes are particularly unsettling because they are uncannily human. They make me think of Pythagoras, who one day came across a man beating a dog and, in the squeals of the creature, heard the familiar voice of his deceased friend. This is often referred to as metempsychosis or ‘the transmigration of the souls’; the idea—originating in ancient Greek, Hindu, and Buddhist thought and developed by philosophers such as Arthur Schopenhauer and Kurt Gödel—that, after biological death, the soul is reborn into another creaturely vessel. Through the allusions to transmigration, viewers of Anquetil’s videoclip are positioned to stare deep into the eyes of the non-human other and to question the legitimacy of the Cartesian human/animal divide.

Before the release of Seaforth, Marshall’s love for canines was well known. Last year, his family dog Patch—a Staffy who has appeared on various occasions in press shots and social media—passed away, and at Primavera Sound, Barcelona (04/06/22), the band paid tribute to their late friend by playing in front of a photo of Patch for the entire performance. In this sense, Patch has become a kind of mascot for King Krule—similar to Lou Dog; the Dalmatian who became the face of Long Beach punk-reggae legends Sublime. Marshall’s deep respect for the animal-other is cemented in Seaforth, where the canines are afforded meaning beyond crude anthropomorphism. While the videoclip has a playful and comedic tone, the dogs become symbols for deeper ideas of interspecies communion, transmigration, and symbiosis.

In a recent press release, Marshall explained that the new album Space Heavy is the product of his fascination with the space between things—the emptiness and void of the universe that seem to perpetually stretch, expand, and, at times, retract. Seaforth suggests that Marshall is not only referring to the space between lovers, places, past, and present, but—in a context of global environmental catastrophe—he seems to be extending these ideas to the ever-widening space between human and non-human animal.

Space Heavy will be released on June 9 via Matador Records.