I meet Archy Marshall in a recording studio called Shrunken Heads, near where he grew up, just south of the River Thames. Inside is a junkyard of off-color pop ephemera: a replica of Alex's dick-nose mask in A Clockwork Orange, three-headed Barbie dolls, a bust of Darth Vader. Outside, on our walk across Nunhead Green to the pub, Marshall is just another neighborhood fixture. A shopkeeper who spots him as we pass waves through the window. “I like that about this area,” the artist better known as King Krule says in a knuckle-dragging bellow that belies his slight frame. There's a lot about the musician that feels out of time, as if he has jumped off the back of a Victorian apple cart into the present. “Today I saw about five people I knew just walking past,” he says.

Marshall is used to the role of local celebrity. Since he started making music from his bedroom 10 years ago, his pastoral jazz-rock has won him fans, from Frank Ocean (who visited him at his home in south London) to Rejjie Snow (with whom he recorded a sulking stoner-rap freestyle in 2013). When Beyoncé plugged Marshall's breakthrough song, “Easy Easy,” on her Beyhive Blog, Marshall told MTV, “It doesn't surprise me.”

Now Marshall, who's 25, is in the midst of a transition that has reoriented his work life and personal life in profound ways—even more profound than finding a fan in Beyoncé.

All clothes his own / Jacket, shirt, T-shirt, and pants, vintage

Last year he became a father. “It gave me a lot of strength. I feel clearer,” the singer says of parenthood with his girlfriend, the photographer Charlotte Patmore. “There was loads of scaremongering about fatherhood, people telling you all this stuff. But Marina has just made it so easy,” he says, referring to his daughter. “There's a spirit within me and her that is always gonna be fine.”

The news that they'd be having a child came just as he was making his new album, Man Alive!, which was released in February. The event also coincided with another big life change.

Marshall moved out of London for the first time, relocating his family to a sprawling green suburbia between Manchester and Liverpool. On his last record, The Ooz, he had depicted howling urban foxes, fistfights, despairing after-party walks, and European love affairs. It was perhaps his most London record, a 66-minute ode to metropolitan desolation. To leave London, I argue, is to leave behind a large part of the King Krule idea. “It was a hard decision, but I think something deep inside of me wanted it,” he says.