Cellular

'Cellular' opens the album with a fractured portrait of disconnection. King Krule moves between intimate domestic scenes and images of global catastrophe, all filtered through the glare of screens and the palm of a hand. A French girl cries on television; a massacre unfolds across the ocean; signal drops away. The song collapses distance and intimacy together, suggesting that watching the world fall apart and losing touch with someone you love amount to the same kind of severance. The lyrics circle around abandonment and the voice that remains when everyone else is gone. Krule's delivery is characteristically deadpan, his words arriving like transmissions from underground, from below the third rail, from anywhere but solid ground. The song builds its unease not through volume but through accumulation, each image stacking atop the last until the frame buckles. An animated video accompanies the track, populated with unsettling figures that match the song's sense of dislocation and dread.