Loyle Carner's unhurried delivery makes him one of UK hip hop's brightest stars

Since that first EP dropped just over two years ago, Carner’s rise has been of the slow, steady, yet sizeable kind. In the space of a year, he’s gone from a sold out show at Corsica Studios to selling out bigger venues in the Capital like Village Underground, Koko and two upcoming nights at Shepherd’s Bush Empire. “It’s been amazing,” he says, with a wry smile.

Carner has won fans for his willingness to lay himself bare in his music. If grime is the rough-and-ready music of the streets, then Loyle’s brand of UK hip hop deals more in sentimentality and domesticity. Subjects include the death of his stepdad (you can hear his voice audibly quiver on track ‘BFG’ when he reaches the refrain ‘Of course I’m fucking sad, I miss my fucking dad’) and he pays homage to the sister he never had on ‘Florence’. As well as laying himself bare, Carner has put his family front and centre of his output, his artwork often featuring old family photos, his mum and brother both featuring in his music videos and his mum even appearing on stage with him from time to time.

“They enjoy it,” he tells us when we ask how his family has reacted to being put in the spotlight. “I do feel a bit protective of them, though, as I’m putting their lives out there a bit.”

And he’s got more to thank his family for than simply providing lyrical inspiration. His early musical education came via his parents playing soul by the likes of Roy Ayers (an influence that can clearly be heard in his output) and he sampled music from an album his stepdad made on his debut LP.

But it was listening to hip hop and grime while channel-hopping between MTV Base and Channel U in the mid-noughties that led to him honing his talent for music on the playground.

“I must have been about eight or nine in school and we’d have little rap battles,” he explains. “Before that I was writing poetry. I ended up battling a lot of older kids in school so I rose up the ranks pretty quickly.”

Then at around the age of 17, when becoming a chef seemed the most tangible option out of his three major ambitions of becoming a footballer, pursuing music or going into the kitchen, he met his musical partner Rebel Kleff and started to take the music side of things a little more seriously.

“We kind of got put together by a mate,” he tells us. “I was making rap without beats and Chris was making music, so my mate said we should hook up. Straight away Chris was like, ‘Do you have somewhere to record?’ And we’ve been best friends ever since.”

Together, the pair have cultivated a sound that draws heavily on old soul samples and recalls the likes of Common, A Tribe Called Quest and Mos Def at their peak, or the soul-heavy UK sounds being pushed by the likes of Skinnyman and Jehst (who make a guest appearance on the album) in the first years of the millennium. And while other notable producers including Tom Misch have worked on the forthcoming album, it’s Ben and Chris’s friendship that’s the rock at the centre of the Loyle Carner project.

“We used to spend a lot of time at Chris’s house making tunes for fun, playing FIFA and drinking beer, saying ‘Just imagine what it’d be like to go on tour,” says Ben. “And now we’re doing it together and it’s just jokes!”