FEATURE:
The Best Albums of 2025
Loyle Carner – hopefully !
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TWO more albums to cover off…
in this series, where I explore the best and my favourite of the year. The penultimate choice is from one of my fave artists, Loyle Carner. I have been a fan of his for many years, and I think that hopefully ! is a phenomenal album. I will come to a review for that album. One of the best-received of this year. I am getting to some interviews with Loyle Carner before that. I want to start off with an interview from CLASH. On an album where Loyle Carner was trying to take himself less seriously and just embrace the moment, he also spoke about Glastonbury, the power of collaborations and his heartfelt and personal new album:
“Much has changed for Loyle in the last decade of his career. Making his debut with 2014 EP ‘A Little Late’, a then-nineteen-year-old Loyle came through with a distinctly British take on rap, inflected with the indie acoustics that soundtracked his childhood home. A Soulquarian influence, too, would shape his early material, layering his candid flows over easy-going, boom-bap beats. At the crux of that self-released project is loss, namely that of his stepfather Nik. And what was evident then was a knack for storytelling influenced by his musical heroes: Mos Def, Jehst and Common.
“I never really thought of myself as an out-and-out rapper,” he tells CLASH, describing his work as a more fluid routine of expression. To the masses, his verses felt familiar, despite being personal. Rapping was an opportunity to memorialise life’s challenges; an outlet and an outpouring of suppressed emotions. “I wasn’t around a lot of men growing up really, so I was in a space where communication of emotion was commonplace,” he explains, when asked about his inherent ability to articulate feelings beyond the surface. “I think I was privy to a lot of scenarios with my mum, my grandmother, and their friends being around the house. I was learning how to operate by being around them.” Whilst he acknowledges the virtues of his upbringing, he cautions against the use of an oversimplified response. “It’s not so cut and dry,” he reminds himself.
‘hopefully !’ finds comfort in new dynamics, in an ensemble of musicians who operate as the record’s North Star. Brought together during his last sold-out tour, Aviram Barath, Richard Spaven, Finn Carter, Mark Mollison, Yves Fernandez and Marla Kether, form the backbone of Loyle’s most collaborative work to date. “I’ve always felt that it’s a very lonely job, to be a musician on your own,” he explains. “I prefer dissolving into a group, as opposed to having to be the figurehead of it. It’s a kind of anonymity, in a way.” On ‘hopefully !’, Loyle had to unlearn his prior process and think of not just the story he wanted to tell but the sonic world he wanted it located in. “Sometimes I would get my lyrics down quite quickly, and then move into the other space with the rest of the guys and think about how musically it should be finished,” he says. “I had to learn how to make music again for the first time. It was quite profound.”
Loyle’s words are situated within spacious production, his purpose revealed in a kind of recital. Take the album’s prelude single ‘in my mind’, an ambling rumination painted in light, poetic brushstrokes that takes on a lulling quality. At first a placeholder for his collaborators, it soon transpired that the record’s snug hooks were destined to be his own. “It speaks to the band’s input and having the right people around me, who were just like, yo, this really sounds like you,” he says. For Loyle, collaborative output is secondary to trust and rapport. “I travel a lot for shows but I’m not really out there like that. I don’t meet many other musicians and I don’t go to events, so I don’t end up meeting people from further afield,” he explains. “I want it [the collaboration] to be organic, and I haven’t known that many people out there for it to be like that.”
Loyle has built a community of hand-picked musicians that speak to his approach. He has a musician’s ear; Madlib, Olivia Dean, John Agard and Sampha have all fallen within his orbit. Amongst them, too, is the late Benjamin Zephaniah. On the title track, a weighted excerpt addresses a fractured Britain. The dub poet draws from his observations of the Brixton riots over wailing police sirens and sax breaks – a confronting listen that comments on the past but deeply resonates with the present. “I think he gave me a continued spice for life,” Loyle says, reflecting on time spent with Zephaniah, a childhood-example-turned-mentor. “His eyes were so open. He was able to have his opinion changed if he felt he was wrong, and he was also happy to stand by his opinion if he felt it was right. I think it takes such humility but also such bravery to do those two things at once. I think a lot of people can do one of them, but not both.”
Mere weeks after our conversation Loyle returns to Glastonbury’s Other Stage. The headline performance is heralded as a defining moment in the post-Glasto reviews and recaps – a warmer, intimate counterpoint to The 1975 on the Pyramid Stage. Visibly emotional, Loyle soaks up the feedback from the captive audience, “the biggest we’ve ever played,” he says awestruck.
“It’s a performance built with one thing in mind: honesty. It’s so easy to put so much money in the wrong places with a show like this. I want to celebrate the band, and I want people to see the stuff that we’re playing. It’s happening in front of their eyes. To me, that’s the magic of it all”.
This might be his most personal album. I think hopefully ! features some of his best lines. One of our greatest voices and lyricists, there are so many standout verses and examples of his brilliance. Even if he does not consider himself as a technical singer or a great one, I think there is much honesty, authenticity and power in his voice. Gravitas and emotion coming through in everything he sings. JUNKEE interviewed an artist who was present and profound on his latest album. It is clear that hopefully ! is the work of a hugely special artist. One who I hope will produce many more albums:
“What’re you hoping listeners take away from the new album?
I have two kids now, and that makes me not focus so much on the past, more on the present, and a little bit on the future. Kids are so present, you can't really explain to them that they're going to get something tomorrow, it has to be right now. My son was in the studio with me a lot when we were making this music so it just became a thing of ‘everything was so immediate’. He was just living in the right now and it’s an infectious thing.
I want people to be able to listen alongside their day, for it to be a companion of the day. Not for it to be something that you have to stop what you're doing and listen to it, but actually more so it can just be by your side through the pieces of your life that you need a friend for. Before hugo, it felt like a disrespect but now I see it as a real privilege that people are comfortable enough to put my shit on and then live their life, because that's the most intimate thing you can do.
This album welcomes your biggest departure from rap, and you’ve talked about Fontaines D.C. being a big influence on hopefully ! How did that inspiration come about?
I was just listening to them a lot. Actually, I was friendly with Grian over DM or whatever, and then I asked — I'm still cool with him — I asked him to be on one of the songs because I wasn't singing at this point. I was nervous about it. He didn't get back to me, and it actually was really useful because him not singing on it meant that I started doing it and then that spiraled into feeling quite comfortable with it. So in a way, I have to thank him or people have to not thank him for how bad my voice sounds, depending on how you see it.
I listened to a lot of Elliott Smith, The Smiths, The Cure, a band called Pinegrove, loads of stuff. That's music I've always listened to and always tried to celebrate. Sometimes you slip into a stereotype, or you do what people expect of you because you think that's how you're going to get through. It's been nice on this album to make music that's a little bit more true to who I am”.
I get hopefully ! is all about change – personally and musically – and a shift. More indebted to Indie and other genres, it is great to see Loyle Carner keep moving and exploring. Billboard spoke with Loyle Carner about his “upcoming fourth album, masculinity in the wake of Netflix's Adolescence and his huge Glastonbury slot”. An icon for British youth, it is fascinating reading interviews with him. So compelling to know about, this is an artist who is a definite role model to so many people:
“hopefully ! is something of a departure for Carner. More in tune with his love for alternative and indie music, his hip-hop stylings make way for inspiration by Irish rockers Fontaines D.C., cult star Mk.gee, Big Thief, Idles and more. The band he assembled for hugo’s live shows followed him into the studio to bring new textures to his compositions.
“It’s a lot of pressure to step out singularly as a rapper. And I’m not even, like, a ‘rapper.’ I just make music, and people like to put me in that box,” he says. “I loved the anonymity of being in a band. I wanted to be around when the magic is happening and to not just be sent a beat after all the fun parts had already happened. I wanted to move away from the words being all that I can contribute.”
Carner’s pen is still mighty, but in a different way. Since his earliest releases, his words have been what has carried him forward and provided renewed inspiration. On 2019’s “Still,” which he described as his “favourite-ever song” during its performance at the Royal Albert Hall, he speaks about his insecurities with a disarming honesty. The rhyming couplets on hugo’s “Nobody Knows (Ladas Road)” and “Homerton” show remarkable dexterity. He knows when to build tension, but also when to let the words breathe. It’s a skill he learned from his poet heroes like Agard and the late, great Benjamin Zephaniah, the man Carner was named after.
As his family has grown, Carner’s techniques and influences have changed. He describes his son as his muse, and his presence is felt throughout the album. hopefully !’s artwork features a snap of Carner and his son, with colorful scrawls and additions only a child can make with such purpose. His voice babbles away throughout the record and his mischievous personality shines. Words could not contain the emotions Carner feels toward him, so the songs became looser, less literal but still emotionally resonant, and with a greater focus on capturing his son’s “melodic” personality in his songwriting structures.
On one album highlight, Carner speaks of the transition of becoming a father and notes that he’s “falling asleep in a chair I used to write in.” Later, he speaks directly to his son, saying, “You give me hope in humankind.” He has learned to embrace sonic imperfections and to capture a feeling, letting broad brushstrokes stand proudly. There’s a childlike wonder to the rawness of these songs; from snatches of phrases to choruses that linger in your head long after music has ended.
PHOTO CREDIT: Oliver Webb
“If you try and color around something or touch it up… you always f–k it up,” Carner says. “That’s what I love about my son’s paintings. It might even be just one line across the page, but the simplicity of how he works and moves on. That’s how I feel now.”
Making the record has given Carner a greater perspective about his role and place in the world and in the family dynamic. “I’m not the main character in the movie any more. It’s my son and daughter’s film, and I’m just some extra in that.”
Carner has long been an advocate for a more healthy relationship with masculinity, having worked with suicide prevention charity CALM (Campaign Against Living Miserably). He gave a passionate speech at Reading & Leeds Festival in August 2023 decrying the “toxic masculine bulls–t” that plagued his childhood. His records and shows have helped unlock certain conversations, but the issue remains prescient. Netflix’s streaming hit Adolescence, which examines the fallout from a misogynistic murder by a 13-year-old boy, has sparked new discussions around the manosphere and its pervasive influence.
Carner saw the intensity of the show — which uses one-shot takes — up close on-set; he’s close friends with actor-creator Stephen Graham and director Philip Barantini. The topics at hand need urgent attention, Carner says. “We’re at an essential need for conversation for young boys to let go of this fear, frustration and anxiety and be able to pass it to someone.
“I’m very glad that my son has my daughter to live with,” he adds. “That’s a huge thing for me, and also for me to be in the presence of someone who is growing up to be a woman. For my son, it’s even crazier, as it’s so natural and safe and understood and demystified.”
He’s most excited for hopefully ! to come out and for his children to hear the snapshot of this moment, about this family, and about the man their dad was when they were little. But what about the fans’ reaction to the new sound and what they might take from it? “Honestly, I don’t care. It’s totally up to them. They could take nothing and not find it for 10 or 20 years or even hate it, but…”
Carner throws his arms up and laughs. “I haven’t even thought about it, actually. I hope that people that do find it and that it can be a good friend to them”.
am going to end things with The Guardian and their positive review for hopefully ! There will be people who have not heard the album, so I would recommend that you check it out. Noting how Carner has a new singing style and has changed since his first three albums, many think that hopefully ! is his greatest work to date:
“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 attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, 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.
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”.
At the moment, Loyle Carner is still on his world tour for hopefully ! There are dates coming next year, that see him visit the U.S. and Canada. It has been an exhaustive tour, but there is that worldwide demand for his music. The brilliant hopefully ! is…
AMONG the best of this year.