REVIEW: Loyle Carner - hopefully !

Parenting is exhausting…

37:44 // June 20th, 2025 // Virgin EMI

It’s no secret that parenthood is hard work. Between changing nappies and saying, “no child of mine is going to listen to ‘Baby Shark’, we’re a Deftones household”, it’s basically full-time HR administration with worse hours. Raising children is one of the most difficult things imaginable, but also rewarding beyond compare and this reality cultivates extremely fertile ground for an artist with the relevant personal experience and musical ability.

Having already cut his teeth with the autobiographical hugo, an album intended to document his own existence for the benefit of his firstborn son, Loyle Carner is perhaps one of the artists best poised to approach this topic with a degree of personal depth. In a scene that is presently awash with aggressive posturing, nursery rhyme level bars (with added profanity) and ten-a-penny beats, Carner remains one of a small contingent holding the fort for thoughtful hip hop in the UK. A craftsman of the form, he leans into jazz-laced production, diaristic bars, and flows that often tiptoe into spoken word with a heavy storytelling component. This affords his style a confessional level of intimacy, like journal entries delivered through rhyme.

Even with this career foundation solidly laid, hopefully ! opts for some dramatic stylistic shifts from his expected sound, all of which are informed by the heavy sentimentality of the subject matter. It’s a bold change of tack to be sure, but undeniably an earnest one, fuelled by genuine emotional impetus: fatherhood, domesticity, existential anxiety, and the fundamental incompatibility between that life and what he represents as an artist. These motifs are rendered with unwavering sincerity, but in execution it all feels rather misty-eyed; rich in feeling but excessively overwrought in mood, even listless in its overall tone. This is less heart-on-sleeve so much as it is heart-giftwrapped-in-lurid-pink-bows-staplegunned-to-forehead.

So no, I unfortunately haven’t been bumping this in the car and giving my axles a good rattle. In fact, to call this ‘hip hop’ at all is a serious stretch; it’s more akin to beat poetry backed by a jazz trio at some open mic event. In fairness, however, although novel, this format plays a large part in the album’s gentle charm. Some of the production choices are actually kind of inspired; the use of live instrumentation, a component Carner has only sporadically toyed with in the past, adds a nice looseness to the arrangements, simplistic as they are. Acoustic numbers (‘lyin’’), rock ballads (‘all i need’), percussion-led shuffles (‘horcrux’), genial piano ditties (‘purpose’)… they all have a good amount of character, and the choice to sub such instrumentals in for more traditional hip hop beats generates a sense of living-room immediacy, and jolts a light defibrillator charge into the flows. It’s all thoughtful, but engaging? Ehhhhhhh….

Still, this mood is the perfect landscape for the grounded humility of Carner’s delivery and lyrics, with much of it feeling affable and pleasantly euphonious if a touch understated. The rapper himself can actually be heard singing on ‘lyin’’ and ‘strangers’; a surprising but well-reasoned choice that assists in purveying a tender tone. Furthermore, ‘about time’ and the title track weave voice samples from Carner’s own children into the mix, not as kitschy affectation, but as quiet emotional anchors that reinforce the album’s architecture. Unfortunately, the inviting atmosphere conjured by such creative choices can only elevate the emotionality for so long, as with precious few of the songs making better time than a sluggish amble, the consistently restrained pace becomes a millstone shackled to the central focus. For a record rooted in the celebration of such things as fatherhood, growth, and love, it’s ironic that the mood becomes so increasingly weighted down by the music, almost like being trapped in a warm embrace that just won’t loosen.

Much like with his previous work, the gravitas of individual tracks (thanks to the quality of Carner’s lyricism) remains his greatest asset. Consistently heartfelt and frequently insightful, his words are not just lived experience, but felt, and it is blindingly apparent that he wants the listener to feel these scenarios as he has/ does. There’s a warm, unpolished relatability to his straightforward eloquence, much in the vein of a quiet exchange between friends in the small hours over coffee and cigarettes. Bars like:

You won’t recognise me like you’ve just been catfished

Smell the sheets on my mother’s mattress

Just the place I learnt my backflips

I burnt the curtain with my matchsticks

• ‘all i need’

and

Getting older still we come here closer, give me

Sweet kisses on my cheek, 'cause when I'm gone you'll miss me

Yeah, don't fix it for me, watch it broken with me

Wishing we was on that wishing wеll throwing fifties

• ‘don’t fix it’

channel his humanity in disarmingly impassioned ways, and aid in forming a fully fleshed-out portrait of the artist as a man first, and a musician second.

Lamentably, that same emotional intensity drawn out over an entire LP becomes an issue when it begins to feel like an endurance test. Its overwhelming sentimentality becomes a burdensome load too heavy for the sparsity of the music, and this toil begins far too early in the experience for the thoughtfulness of the content to sink its claws into the listener effectively. To compound the effect, Carner’s delivery, which is known for being steadily even-toned yet simultaneously very genuine, is at its most hushed and husky here; a half-mumbled teetering between contemplative and comatose.

There are some flickers of variation in the features that assist in preventing the prevalent waveform from flatlining too hard, such as the title track’s spoken-word segment from Benjamin Zephaniah, Navy Blue’s self-assured grit (‘purpose’) and Nick Hakim’s wispy croon (‘don’t fix it’), but the default mode remains resolutely on the border between mellow and tedious. Its languor becomes so overbearing that, by the halfway point, it begins to undercut the emotional authenticity of the lyrics, pulling the intended effect down until it crosses over from achingly earnest into one-dimensional melodrama. ‘purpose’ stands out in this regard, partly because of Navy Blue’s grounded style, but also because it feels like something actually happened. Though subtle, it’s a shift in energy, and this admittedly slight changeup is what the record desperately needed more of to keep its texture interesting.

Having become a father twice over myself in recent years, the idea of Carner focusing squarely on the topic of parenthood for an entire album was more than just compelling for me. I absolutely get that he is going to pour his experiences as a parent into his art- why wouldn’t he? I was fully prepared for the dramatic tonal shift; what I wasn’t prepared for was a full-on emotional intervention through jazz poetry. Despite all of my complaints about the overall weariness though, it’s not a bad record at all. It’s undeniably rich with meaning and utterly wholehearted in its pathos, but along the way these attributes become stifling. The texture disintegrates, the momentum decelerates, and the emotionally-charged core, honest as it is, begins to lose its gravitational pull. Added into the measured tempo of the instrumentation, the whole project starts to feel less like a cohesive artistic statement than a well-intentioned detour. But smelling the individual roses along the way? Fine. Enjoyable, even. It’s not that the record lacks heart- if anything, it might have too much of it. The earnestness is so thick you could whip it into a meringue and it runs through everything, from the subdued vocal delivery to the foggy pacing of the music. As pleasant as it is to see Carner attempt something a little different, hopefully ! is an expression of vulnerability that’s admirable in theory, but utterly exhausting in practice.

6/10

Further Listening:

Mr. Key & Greenwood Sharps - Yesterday’s Futures

Sampha - Process

Deca - Snakes and Birds

Knucks - ALPHA PLACE

Little Simz - Lotus

Ed Scissor, Lamplighter - Better.Luck.Next.Life

Philanthrope - Todai Moto Kurashi