Loyle Carner: 'hugo'
“Let me tell you what I hate / everything I ain’t,” Loyle Carner announces during the opening lines of his new album ‘hugo’, out Friday on EMI. The biggest question that faces Carner on his third studio full-length is one that he’s contemplated for some time… “I’m young, Black, successful and have a platform - but where do I go next?”
Aiming to extrapolate answers throughout the album’s ten tracks, Carner regularly confronts his demons, posing rhetorical questions as if they were written to be refuted. “You can’t hate the roots of a tree, and not hate the tree / So how can I hate my father without hating me?” he expresses on ‘Ladis Road (Nobody Knows)’, as a fractured chorus of voices play their part in a fiery two-hander, juxtaposing his own razor-sharp, Mephisto-esque judgements with a famous Malcolm X quote.
Famous for his jazzy hip-hop beats, inward-facing rhymes about family and relationships, and humble persona, Carner has cemented himself at the forefront of a wave of UK hip-hop talent. Introducing himself on to the scene with his 2017 debut ‘Yesterday’s Gone’, it was his 2019 follow-up ‘Not Waving, But Drowning’ that solidified his songwriting credentials, as he solicited a range of collaborations with the likes of long-time friend Tom Misch and fellow riser Jorja Smith.
Whilst his previous releases focus on life at home, ‘hugo’ has a much wider remit than the albums that precede it; a perfect snapshot of this is during the video for single ‘Georgetown’, as Carner overlooks a Guyanese coastal horizon, he’s looking further afield for inspiration these days. Whether it be the racial tension that was stoked on both sides of the pond during the summer of 2020, naming the album after the birthplace of his paternal grandmother or the rise of knife crime in his hometown, ‘hugo’ is an assortment of worldly influences and stories born out of the three years between his releases.
‘Blood on my Nikes’ is a documentary-like track that investigates dark memories from Carner’s past, specifically the day he witnessed a murder aged “barely sixteen,” backed up by sinister horn sections and a spoken-word speech by teenage activist and Yuck Magazine alumni, Athian Akec, on the perils of knife crime. Recently becoming a father himself, Carner aims to provide a realistic version of events for his young son, who will one day have to make sense of the racially illiterate society we live in, “I told the black man he didn’t understand / I reached the white man he wouldn’t take my hand,” he chillingly confesses. ‘Plastic’ takes aim at BBC’s rolling news coverage, tabloid splashes and “the plastic guy at the paper that thinks that Kano looks like Wiley.” Between them, they continuously look at the world through white-tinted glasses, painfully ignorant of the impact their observations have on wider political discourse. “Ah, with your plastic friends, yeah, and your plastic chick / You're a plastic prick, look at all your plastic shit,” he emphatically denounces.
“I start to think about the legacy I leave,” Carner raps on ‘Homerton’. It’s the one question he ponders that the rest of us don’t. Leaving a clear patrimony that will be doubtlessly passed from artist to artist in the years to come. One thing’s for real though, there is and only ever will be, one Loyle Carner. In producing his most lustrous release to date, a fact that has to be owed in part to the exceptional production from Madlib, Carner has bound his name in hip-hop folklore in the same vein as The Beatles did with UK guitar music. He’s the king of the scene, he just doesn't know it yet.
