Loyle Carner: Hopefully! review – rap sweetheart faces family, fear and the feels

The Guardian

6 hours ago

Loyle Carner raps like he has a lump in his throat and tears in his eyes. Wonder, nostalgia, love, hurt, excitement, hard-won peace: these are the emotions his voice tends to catch on. When combined with his typically blissed-out sonics – feathery breakbeats, dreamy piano figures, delicate synth washes, gently plucked guitars – the results are often very nice. Sometimes a bit too nice. So it is on Feel at Home, the sentimental love song that opens the 30-year-old's fourth album, Hopefully!
Carner – whose moniker is a spoonerism of his real name, Benjamin Coyle-Larner – never makes music that is boring or basic. As well as the slushy lyrics and comfortingly toasty chords, Feel at Home is buttressed by madly skittering percussion and what sounds like a blurry reproduction of young children's playground chatter. But much like the outpouring of earnestness and loveliness on the Croydon-raised rapper's first two albums, Hopefully! may well have you hankering for a shred of dissonance or disruption – especially after 2022's Mercury-shortlisted Hugo, which gratifyingly offset Carner's trademark tenderness with a more abrasive sonic palette. Initially, the musician seems to have moved on – or perhaps backwards – from that record.
Then he starts singing. Carner has said he was duped into doing so by his producer, Avi Barath (he originally thought his vocal track was a placeholder for another performer). It was a trick worth playing: whenever Carner slips into his low-pitched, totally unaffected croon, it cuts through any over-sweetness like a squeeze of lemon. The combination works particularly well on the exceptional In My Mind – whose lugubrious self-laceration and loose, clattery instrumentation recalls King Krule's thrilling early work, while always remaining characteristically Carner – as well as in the choruses of Lyin and Strangers. The latter's sing-song central refrain is flatly murmured in a way that feels authentically uncertain and all the more appealing for it.
Vulnerability has always been Carner's lyrical stock-in-trade. It tends to manifest in two ways, first in open-hearted sincerity that has generated songs about grief and ADHD, and which is in full flow on the album's title track: 'You give me hope in humankind, but are humans kind? / I don't know but I hope so.' Second, in a less anodyne and far more striking form of introspection: on In My Mind, he admits a tendency towards myopic self-obsession and alludes to the bitter dismissal of a 'minor friend'.
Carner has two young children, and the artwork for Hopefully! features the kind of felt-tip scrawl most toddler-wranglers will recognise. Parenting is the album's major theme, and there are moments when Carner approaches it from a compellingly raw angle. On About Time, covering the tensions between fatherhood and artistry, the narrator lists the thrills of his job before describing what sounds like a fight with his partner, in which he lets slip yet 'another fucking thing I know you couldn't forgive'. Yet for all Carner's accounts of the internal and external conflict involved in fatherhood, it's hard to buy the more damning self-critique – on Lyin he claims to be 'just a man trained to kill, to love I never had the skill' – from an artist who makes music this heartfelt.
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Lyin introduces a third lyrical mode, capturing early parenthood's transcendent surreality in a stream of impressionistic imagery: Carner looks for reassurance under sofa cushions; his bedroom walls fall 'to Poseidon'. Progressing from anxiety to confusion to a strange elation, he is overcome by the way his child's hand reflexively tightens as he attempts to let go of it and how bright the sky looks in the middle of the night. His voice radiates awe and trepidation-tinged delight. It is magical songwriting, and his most impressive work to date.
Even before fatherhood, Carner's work fixated on family: his mother is unusually omnipresent in his music, even by hip-hop's standards. His 2019 song Dear Jean even took pains to insist that his new girlfriend was no threat to the pair's intimacy. She's still never far away; over luminous guitars on All I Need, he recalls the smell of 'the sheets on my mother's mattress – just the place I learnt my backflips'. It's classic Carner: the place where heady feeling threatens to tip over into cloying soppiness. Yet thanks to a pleasingly precarious new vocal style and some levelled-up lyricism, he's more adept than ever at this specific balancing act.
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