No. 10 Drowning
“Very very very very very very very very rare”. That’s how Archy Marshall was understood back in those days. Marshall has gone by a number of different aliases—Zoo Kid, King Krule, DJ JD Sports, Pimp Shrimp—since he first announced himself to the indie scene as a sixteen-year-old dead-eyed Tintin with a voice like a brickie’s trowel. One evening, in March 2016, he was Edgar the Breathtaker, though his slippery identity wasn’t lost on his audience: “Edgar… AKA Young Edgar… AKA so many AKAs”, the MC clarified for the crowd.
The particular video I’m thinking of captures a fleeting public appearance for Marshall at this time in his life, caught between the twin phenomena of his first King Krule albums, the scene-stealing debut 6 Feet Beneath the Moon and the high-water mark The OOZ. He holds the mic for a little over 15 minutes but it is seared into my memory: bass reverberating around a derelict, red-lit room sheltering a hundred souls from the drizzly London evening, all hypnotised by Marshall and his amorphous crew with their backs to the crowd broadcasting fizzy, dubwise rap through speakers that barely fit under the low ceiling. It’s a performance that identifies why Boiler Room once held so much cultural cachet: occasionally the video switches to a handheld camera that frames Marshall within a slanted wave of bobbing heads swilling Stellas and I’m quite violently reminded of the once-transformational potential of the internet to make the past feel truly alive.
To my knowledge, this video is the only documented live performance of songs from Archy Marshall’s 2015 album, A New Place 2 Drown, which turns ten years old this evening. Fittingly, the album is just as surreal, dank, and arresting as the performance which situates it in space and time. It truly sounds nothing like anything I’ve heard before or since. It is my favourite album. And it’s surprisingly infrequent that you get to write about your favourite album, even when you commandeer your own music blog, so I won’t mince words in my assessment of it on such a significant anniversary.
A New Place 2 Drown is a production masterpiece. The album has the sound of what I would call slip hop—greyscale, rain-soaked mutant dubstep, with an air of unseasonable humidity, sometimes perfumed by the lingering smoke of a lit J—and somehow achieves a brutal tonal consistency while remaining completely enigmatic. Marshall’s drum programming bears no resemblance to itself song-to-song. The record’s opening suite shuffles from a languorous proto-drill pattern (‘Any God Of Yours’) into a jazz-café DnB break (‘Swell’) into a swaying 808s & Heartbreak groove with psycho hi-hats (‘Arise Dear Brother’). Yet each track bleeds into the next almost indistinguishably; it’s only when album highlight ‘Ammi Ammi’ abruptly snaps into a sharp, Dilla-esque groove that A New Place 2 Drown forces you to attention.
And for good reason: Marshall’s idea of a smokers’ anthem is one infused with some of the most inventive hip-hop sound design this side of Dilla himself. Implacable polyrhythmic percussion and neon synth beams dance around a wandering bassline that sounds like a hollow tree log. He wheels out an organ, then puts it away. At least three different guitars noodle away in different levels of the mix. And still the track is as fleet-footed as anything else on the record. Marshall the producer is operating on an uninhabited plane here; the sounds at his disposal on A New Place 2 Drown are limitless and acutely moreish. Where you would expect to locate the kick-snare of ‘The Sea Liner MK 1’ is instead occupied by the sonorous thwack of two pool balls. He deftly sharpens the attack of his synth stabs on ‘Eye’s Drift’ and ‘Thames Water’ to amplify the slick weirdness of the former and the dire alienation of latter. Bubbles constantly float to the surface of ‘New Builds’ as if the song were submerged in lager.
Which is also to say that, despite the American origins of Marshall’s Wu-Tang worship and MPC wizardry, A New Place 2 Drown is a subtly, persistently British album. The lens through which Marshall filters his particular strain of hip-hop is dub, and so does he forgo the dusty strut of classic 90s rap in favour of ragga-like loping rhythms and soundclash-quality bass (a more granular geographic interpretation would say that A New Place 2 Drown is South London personified). What’s equally striking, though, and perhaps less remarked-upon, is how laddish the album is. Marshall’s rapping—grimly poetic and preternaturally competent, I should add—is consumed with the expected primary comforts of a young man with the world at his feet. “You don’t have to rush my pace, I always come”, he happily confesses on ‘Arise Dear Brother’. It’s not lost on you, in these pockets, where Marshall devotes bar after bar in service of his lust, or writes of lighting up yet another spliff, that he was just twenty-one while composing this record.
This is the eternal wonder of A New Place 2 Drown: only a twenty-one-year-old could so nonchalantly unspool these stories of inner-city moral decay; and yet how on Earth could a twenty-one-year-old make those stories sound this alluring? “She’s pinging on some dizz, guess I owe a lot to that / but her eyes are still in lid, and her brain is still intact”, Marshall drolly intones on ‘Buffed Sky’ over a stalking beat that projects the sickly charm of a guy you absolutely would not want around the woman in question. ‘Sex With Nobody’ doesn’t deal in such subtext: “Some men are dogs, to be specific”.
These men are real, the world is menacing, and at the same time it can be sincerely intoxicating. I don’t think you’re old enough at twenty-one to make a coherent statement about any of these uneasy truths. Better to churn them all together and see what oozes out. Ten years ago, Archy Marshall skunked through a city of “unknown brothers and unknown sisters, locked in blood, gunk, fluids and mixtures of sweat, grease, chicken, beef and love-leaking stitches” and the art that came pouring out of him must have sounded like the future happening in real time. Ten years later, the grimy life Marshall captured on A New Place 2 Drown remains perfectly preserved, only now it leaves behind a burnished confidence and the dull ache of a world you faintly remember.
Sam Gollings
10 December 2025