Loyle Carner: Hopefully! review – rap sweetheart faces family, fear and the feels
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.
Sign up to Sleeve Notes
Get music news, bold reviews and unexpected extras. Every genre, every era, every week
after newsletter promotion
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.
Big Thief – Incomprehensible
This taster of the Brooklyn band's sixth album, Double Infinity, ups the tempo as frontperson Adrianne Lenker makes peace with the aging process in her trademark stream-of-consciousness style. The sound is fittingly cosmic; the overall effect truly sublime.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Daily Mail
29 minutes ago
- Daily Mail
EXCLUSIVE How I solved mystery of which 'lie' still annoys Meghan 8 years on: From tiara-gate to Kate's tears, ALISON BOSHOFF examines the evidence... and comes to a stunning conclusion
Prince Harry is, famously, a man who bears a grudge. And in an interview with entrepreneur Emma Grede this week, the Duchess of Sussex revealed they have that peevish capacity in common. Grede asked Meghan on her Aspire podcast: 'If you could rewrite your public narrative from scratch, is there anything you would do differently?' Meghan replies: 'Yes. I would ask people to tell the truth.'
Daily Mail
an hour ago
- Daily Mail
Zak Starkey teams up with Paul McCartney and John Lennon's sons as they work on 'The Beatles kids' after he was sacked from The Who again
Zak Starkey has teamed up with Paul McCartney and John Lennon 's sons as they work on 'The Beatles kids' after he was sacked from The Who again. The son of Ringo Starr, 59, was fired from the band last month, just one month after he was sacked then quickly reinstated. He has now revealed that he is working on new music with Sean Lennon and James McCartney and they have collaborated on a song. Speaking in a new interview, Zak admitted that the idea was something he had avoided for fears of being 'judged forever.' He told The Sun: 'I thought it was a daft idea. But I've got to know James well over the last decade and Sean over the last five years and we have become great friends. 'Their music is great. I had a track called Rip Off and as we were communicating a lot I asked them to contribute.' Zak added: 'We were nervous in case there was no chemistry but there was loads and it sounded great. James' voice powerful it nearly blew me off my seat.' Sean, 48, is the second child of the late icon John, while James, 47, is Paul's only son and youngest child, who he welcomed with his late ex-wife Linda Eastman. In May, The Who guitarist Pete Townshend took to Instagram to announce that Zak, drummer since 1996, was no longer part of the band. But Zak quickly took to his own social media to claim that his departure was not a mutual decision and that he was fired from the band. His sacking comes just months ahead of the legendary bands farewell tour across North America and Pete revealed Scott Devours will replace him on drums. The statement from Pete read: 'After many years of great work on drums from Zak the time has come for a change. A poignant time. Zak has lots of new projects in hand and I wish him the best.' In a second post, Pete and Roger Daltrey added: 'The Who are heading for retirement, whereas Zak is 20yrs younger and has a great future with his new band and other exciting projects. 'He needs to devote all his energy into making it all a success. We both wish him all the luck in the world.' They continued: 'Scott Devours – Who fans will know him from Roger's solo shows – will be replacing Zak. We hope all our fans will welcome him. Pete Townshend and Roger Daltrey'. Resharing The Who's post, Zak hit back: 'I was fired two weeks after reinstatement and asked to make a statement saying I had quit the who to pursue my other musical endeavours this would be a lie. 'I love the who and would never had quit. So I didn't make the statement ….quitting The Who would also have let down the countless amazing people who stood up for me (thank you all a million times over and more) thru the weeks of mayhem of me going 'in an out an in an out an in an out like a bleedin squeezebox x. 'To clarify "other projects" yes I do have other projects and always have. The Who have been sporadic or minimalist in touring most years apart from a two extensive tours in 2000 and 2006/7.' Zak continued to list his other previous projects before adding: 'Releasing singles but not touring cos members are so busy. None of this has ever interfered with The Who and was never a problem for them. 'The lie is or would have been that I quit The Who- I didn't. I love the who and everyone in it.' Zak again took to his Instagram account to share that his version of events had been contradicted yet again after a phone call with The Who singer-guitarist Roger. Zak said Roger told him he hadn't actually been fired and instead 'retired to work on his own projects'. Resharing The Who's post, Zak hit back: 'I was fired and asked to make a statement saying I had quit the who to pursue my other musical endeavours this would be a lie' He wrote: 'NOISE&CONFUSION!!!! I had a great phone chat with Roger at the end of last week which truly confused both of us!!! 'Rog said I hadn't been 'fired'…I had been 'retired' to work n my own projects. I explained to Rog that I have just spent nearly 8 weeks at my studio in Jamaica completing these projects, that my group Mantra Of The Cosmos was releasing one single at the beginning of June and after that had run its course ( usually 5/6 weeks ) I was completely available for the foreseeable future…. 'Rog said "Oh!" and we kind of left it there- On good terms and great friends as we have always been. 'Gotta love these guys. As my mum used to say "The mind boggles!!!" XXX.' It comes weeks after The Who .
Daily Mail
an hour ago
- Daily Mail
EDEN CONFIDENTIAL: Art dealer's withering verdict on Petra Ecclestone's ex James Stunt
Cleared of all charges relating to a £266 million money-laundering scam – unlike his four fellow co-defendants, three of whom are on the run – James Stunt, who was declared bankrupt in 2019, argues that the value of his artworks, currently held by museums and galleries, is greater in value than his debts. But I can disclose that perhaps the most impeccably informed of Stunt's old acquaintances disagrees. New York art dealer Ezra Chowaiki, released from a US prison in 2020 after a 13-month stretch for fraud, first met the self-styled gold bullion dealer one weekend in 2015, when Stunt was still married to Formula 1 heiress Petra Ecclestone. What followed was so extraordinary that it helped spur Chowaiki into writing an eye-popping expose of the art world, the basis for a documentary now in development. 'Even within the absurd circus that is the high-end art world, Stunt stood out as a master clown,' Chowaiki tells me from New York, recalling their first encounter during which Stunt asserted that his Rolls was 'the only truly bulletproof car in England' and 'worth £1 million'. At his Mayfair office – which resembled 'something between Miami Vice and Succession' – Stunt reached into a safe, threw an object into Chowaiki's lap and asked: 'Do you know how much that's worth?' It was a gold ingot. Chowaiki then offered Stunt a painting. It was, aptly, a clown by Salvador Dali, priced £1.16million. Stunt responded by getting out his phone, showing Chowaiki two paintings by French artist Georges Braque and saying that he'd trade them for the Dali and $1million. Saying that he'd think about it, Chowaiki left London. In the following week, he alleges, he was 'hounded' by Stunt, who now offered the Braques for the Dali plus $500,000, and sent a series of 'increasingly deranged and voluminous texts'. Chowaiki insisted that Stunt send him photos of the Braques in their frames. 'The images he had sent could have been scanned from books,' reflects Chowaiki, who says that he had severe doubts about the authenticity of one of the paintings in particular. He had one last exchange with Stunt, who lent several paintings to Dumfries House – saved for the nation by King Charles – only for it to emerge that a number of them were fakes. Called by Stunt, who was seeking guidance about how to have the Picassos in his collection authenticated, Chowaiki explained that they should be submitted to Picasso's son, Claude. He recalls that Stunt asked in a 'hushed' tone: 'Do you think Claude could The comment (presumably a joke) made Chowaiki laugh, he recalls, before he explained to Stunt that Claude 'would never compromise himself'. A source close to Stunt says that the visit to his office couldn't have happened as he did not have access to his office at weekend. Doubtless Stunt is speaking in good faith, besides which, as his former butler, John Gilmour, told the Mail On Sunday last month, he frequently enjoyed Sunday lunch with his godfather, convicted crime baron Terry Adams. But one wonders if he has failed, in this instance, to take into account his past cocaine addiction and the consequent damage that it might have done to his memory. Chowaiki's texts for the weekend in question unequivocally show that Stunt asked to meet him on September 27, 2015. The source additionally insists he did not toss a gold ingot as Chowaiki suggests and denies that Stunt ever asked whether Claude Picasso could be influenced. Chowaiki, aware that he blotted his own copybook, counters: 'As unreliable a narrator as I may be, I'm still better than most in this field. Plus, I keep my texts.' Double take as 'Kate' parties at Annabel's The Princess of Wales's absence from Royal Ascot was much remarked-upon, and some at Annabel's summer solstice party were convinced they had spotted her at the private members club in Mayfair. However, on closer inspection, they realised it was Meg Bellamy, who played the younger version of Catherine in drama The Crown. The actress, 22, wore a white mini dress, and one guest tells me: 'I had to do a double take.' Hancock's new ink Matt Hancock's reinvention continues. The former Tory MP, 46, resigned as health secretary after CCTV showed him kissing and embracing Gina Coladangelo, his aide, at Whitehall in breach of Covid distancing restrictions in 2021. The pair were both married to other people. This week, his daughter Hope, 18, announced online: 'My dad got a tattoo today. Mid-life crisis.' Hancock declines to say which design is now inked on his body – or on which part of his anatomy – telling me: 'I'm not commenting.' Not like him… Brian's boozy podcast appearance Recalling actor Brian Cox's recent appearance on her podcast, chef Angela Hartnett mischievously claims the Succession star, 79, got tipsy on margaritas before going on the West End stage that night. With Cox playing JS Bach in The Score at the time, Hartnett quips: 'We just got Brian Cox drunk, it was fine. He went on to do a show later, it was amazing.' Podcast co-host Nick Grimshaw says: 'He got right on it.' Surely not! Dominic West and Alexandra Tolstoy share trek's appeal Dominic West once trekked to the South Pole with Prince Harry, who later shunned him. But The Affair star's latest adventure found him saddling up with a far more appealing companion. Alexandra Tolstoy, 51, rode horseback across Kyrgyzstan with West, 55, for a new documentary. 'It's a bit embarrassing I haven't watched The Wire,' she says of one of the actor's most celebrated TV dramas. 'But it's been so much fun.' Author and broadcaster Tolstoy is a tourism ambassador for the former Soviet state. Royal fiction is foul play The Royal Family may feel they have enough to contend with from America, especially its West Coast. But things can deteriorate further, judging by a play now being performed off Broadway. It would be a challenge to summarise Prince Faggot – the play's title – as merely 'imaginative', given that it features a fetish mask and recreational drugs and other activities which would look more in place in Fifty Shades Of Grey. A programme note asserts that all the text is fictional and adds that 'any resemblance to real events is purely coincidental'. Yet playwright Jordan Tannahill opts for a central character called Prince George, son of the Prince and Princess of Wales, William and Kate. Shame on Tannahill. The smart set's talking about Henry's Royal Ascot role Carriage three in the Royal Procession caught the eye at Royal Ascot, thanks to the elegant figure of Harriet Sperling, the paediatric nurse accompanying the King's nephew, Peter Phillips, just over a year after the couple – both divorced – were first seen together in public. Their marital histories would once have made their attendance unthinkable, but this more forgiving era had another beneficiary – in carriage four. Not Lady Joanna Morton Jack, the Earl and Countess of Halifax's only daughter, but Joanna's husband, judge's son Henry Morton Jack. A barrister of brilliance, he's described as 'hugely talented' by Chambers legal directory. But he's not always been quite so upright... most memorably at a Madonna film premiere party in his youth when he and his chum, Prince and Princess Michael of Kent's son, Lord Freddie Windsor, took a little too much refreshment. Tuesday was certainly a day to build up a thirst but, happily, Henry, 46, remained splendidly vertical. How divorced Luke finally beat drugs Rupert Murdoch's former grandson-in-law, British rapper Luke 'Lukey' Storey, has spoken publicly for the first time about the addiction that destroyed his marriage to the media magnate's granddaughter – just 12 hours after they said 'I do'. Charlotte Freud, 24, daughter of media executive Elisabeth Murdoch and PR supremo Matthew Freud, married Luke in 2022 in a star-studded Cotswolds wedding with guests including Woody Harrelson and Claudia Winkleman. But behind the spectacle, the couple were already teetering on the brink. 'We had been married for 12 hours when our whole world fell apart,' Charlotte later admitted. Luke relapsed on the way to their honeymoon. What followed was a turbulent, 14-month marriage marked by mutual attempts at recovery – and frequent collapse. for Sarah's memoir, How Not To Be A Political Wife, at Hatchards in Piccadilly, London. 'It wasn't easy writing this book – and for some it will be an equally difficult read,' she admits. Luke, 39, now says: 'I ruined a lot of relationships while I was using – people I loved dearly, close friends, family. You can't heal relationships while you're still actively hurting yourself.' Sarah's bond with Kemi She may have fallen out with David 'man-baby' Cameron, but my colleague Sarah Vine enjoys warmer relations with the current Tory leader. Kemi Badenoch joined guests including Kirstie Allsopp and Piers Morgan at the launch party for Sarah's memoir, How Not To Be A Political Wife, at Hatchards in Piccadilly, London. 'It wasn't easy writing this book – and for some it will be an equally difficult read,' she admits. (Very) modern manners The love lives of Fern Britton's daughters are providing inspiration for her novels. 'Grace has a lovely partner, but Winnie is single, and whilst she's a very attractive girl, it all seems so difficult now,' says Fern, 67, who separated from their father, TV chef Phil Vickery, in 2020. 'In the 1970s, a man would come and say, 'Oh, do you want to go out?' and you'd reply, 'Yes, thank you'. Now, it seems they're all giving each other therapy about someone they've been seeing for ten days.' She tells Saga magazine: 'I was intrigued about how these relationships work and wanted to explore that a bit.'
