“I broke the cycle,” declares south London rapper Loyle Carner, savagely but happily. He’s talking about HGU – one of the most hard-hitting songs on his resonant third album, Hugo. As his band of nuanced live players slide gracefully into languid, jazz-tinged breakbeats, Carner dedicates the song to “my father, and his father, and his father’s father”, as a sold-out crowd bay their approval. We’re neck-deep in the first of a two-night residency in London towards the end of Carner’s UK tour: there’s another sellout – at the 12,500-capacity Wembley Arena – the following night, which will be livestreamed.
Even if you don’t know Carner’s own story, it would be hard to throw a pebble and not hit someone with daddy issues. There is a sense in this room of him strumming people’s pain with his fingers. The music fades out to leave him, clad in simple white T-shirt, rapping a cappella. His final verse goes hard against the conditions that created his line of absent fathers – who were, to quote Philip Larkin, “fucked up in their turn” – looking for a break point in the circuit. Carner wants to “rewrite the ending, and the prequel” because for “the cycle to repeat” is the “default”.
