British-Guyanese rapper Loyle Carner, famous for tackling tough issues through deep music, is coming to O2 Academy Bournemouth on Thursday 9 March.
With a nomination for Best Hip Hop/Grime/Rap Act at the Brit Awards last weekend, Loyle continues his meteoric rise to the top with his latest studio album, Hugo.
With Hugo, Loyle confronts both the deeply personal and the highly political, reaching deeper beneath the surface than he ever has before.
Cinematic in scale and scope, Hugo is both a rallying war cry for a generation forged in fire and a study of the personal internal conflict that drives the rest of the album – as a mixed-race Black man, as an artist, as a father and as a son.
Hugo sees Carner taking a sharp detour from his previous work, putting it down to lockdown and the “hedonistic side of career being stripped away. There were no shows, no backstage, no festivals, no photoshoots”.
By continuing to write in these tumultuous times with a renewed clarity and sense of artistic freedom, Carner reached deeper beneath the surface than he ever had before.
The result is his most cathartic and ambitious record yet, a coruscating journey into the heart of what it means to be alive in these tumultuous times, and one which looks set to neatly cement his position as one of the most potent and vital young talents around today.
There’s a striking duality of Hugo’s bold, multilayered tracks and its often starkly intimate and tender lyricism, and that dichotomy is deliberate – it is a message for young Black men, but really, anyone, who is listening.
Tickets for Loyle Carner: The Hugo Tour are on sale at: academymusicgroup.com.
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