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

(Island EMI)The Londoner’s trademark sentimental sweetness is balanced by a new unaffected singing style – his fourth album is his most impressive work yetLoyle 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. Continue reading...

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