hopefully ! - Loyle Carner

The Mic's Will Griffin reflects on Loyle Carner's landmark latest album hopefully !

Loyle Carner has never been an artist to stagnate. His career has been one of continuing evolution, each album building upon the last and hopefully! is yet another brick in the wall. The Carner that introduced himself with 2017’s Yesterday’s Gone is not the same Loyle of hopefully! yet the sensibilities remain. What is steadfast in his work (and has earned him the ‘kindest man in rap’ moniker) is a clear sense of what is important, from the familial intermissions of Swear and Sun of Jean on Yesterday’s Gone, to the playful chatter of his son on hopefully!’s closer about time. If 2022’s hugo was an album of self reckoning, of Carner finding his place in a world continuously evolving around him, then on hopefully! he’s arrived. 

The album is a departure stylistically from the beat and percussion combinations that earnt him this year's Friday night headline slot at Glastonbury’s Other Stage. The soul samples are ditched for airy chords and wandering guitar lines, yet the percussion remains resulting in a sound that’s a marked departure from hugo’s dissonance. Take both albums' opening tracks as a case study. The chopped and reversed gospel sample of hate alongside its opening line ‘let me tell you what I hate’ couldn’t be further than the pillowy keys of feel at home and the repeated ‘You feel like home’ that echoes throughout. What emerges immediately on hopefully! is the authority with which Carner commands both his sound and his voice. On in my mind, Carner professes he ‘became the guy I know that I can be’ and has spoken of the track as a reflection of his attempts to ‘get back to the stuff I listened to before I was told what I should listen to’, citing Elliot Smith, The Cure and Bob Dylan amongst his inspirations (Loyle-carner-in-my-mind-lyrics). 

What’s so impressive about hopefully! is that such a marked departure from Carner’s tried and tested style never feels underbaked, and perhaps that owes to Loyle’s return to the music of his youth. The sparse, crackling acoustic guitar that opens strangers serves as an example, with the repeated ‘hours turn to days we feel like strangers’ softly sung by Carner himself. Carner has spoken publicly of his intention for his vocal parts throughout the album to be just placeholders, that his aim was for them to be adopted by artists like Grian Chatten or Adrianne Lenker - yet the aforementioned’s unavailability is what roots the project in the personal. No doubt Chatten and Lenker would have brought their own brilliance to the record, but whether they would have held the same authenticity is another question altogether. Carner’s unassuming croon is as tender as it is pitch perfect, and the trick of using vocal tracks never intended for release brings his audience closer once more. 

Vulnerability has consistently been Carner’s currency and the album’s titular track with a cameo from the late, great Benjamin Zephaniah brings the question of raising children in a troubled world to the fore. From the opening verse Carner professes to ‘keep [his children] out of the light’, continuing in the chorus to state his children give him ‘hope in human kind, but are humans kind?’. What’s revelationary about hopefully! is that an artist usually so introspective turns his pen to the world around him. Even on the polemic turns of hugo, Carner was still trying to find his own position in the world, as seen in Speed of Plight’s repeated ‘is the world moving fast for you as well? I can’t tell if it be only me’. On hopefully! Carner is charged by the responsibility he now bears for two young children. ‘Soft cheeks to speak like infants - there’s purpose in my existence’, Carner poses on the album’s penultimate track purpose. For most artists, channelling Carner’s sincerity could border on cloying sentimentality, yet what hopefully! projects is an artist in full control of his faculties,

looking for hope in the darkness. ‘It’s about time that I learnt some patience- just to give it to him.’

Will Griffin

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Edited by Alice Beard

Official hopefully ! LP cover courtesy of Loyle Carner, video courtesy of Loyle Carner on Youtube