Last year I was lucky enough to catch Loyle Carner headline one of the stages at All Points East Festival and was completely blown away by his performance. Admittedly I haven’t been to many hip hop gigs in my life, but I’d been to enough to pick a highlight and Loyle was it. A true commander of the stage, he was calm and steely eyed, with a genuine purpose to say something on stage and connect with the audience. No easy task with a sauced up crowd at the end of a long day, but he managed it with ease, exploding with energy on tracks like “Ain’t Nothing Changed” and “No CD” before dialling it back for “Ottolenghi” and “Loose Ends” where he leaned on some favourable friends like Tom Misch to join him on stage. I was a fan before, but a mega fan afterwards, and was therefore delighted on Monday to see him releasing his new song “Hate”.
It’s a bold and typically impassioned number from the South London songwriter who continues to push boundaries with every release. With fierce breakbeat percussion chopping in and out of the intro’s choral backing vocals like an impatient middle school drummer, there’s an immediate sense of bottled rage on the track that finally sets into it’s fiery rhythm with Loyles opening line “Let me tell you what I hate, everything I ain’t
Everything I’ve done, everything I break“.
Genius Lyrics notes that “Hate” is a “powerful and rage-filled track”, that “offers insight into what it is to be black, and the loves, seductions and hatreds of Loyle’s life. Loyle grittily exposes the experience of being trapped in racial profiling and the fears he faces“. In the video above, self directed by Carner and his co-director Greg Hackett, this sentiment is keenly felt. A tour de force performance sees the rapper become increasingly irate with a driver pulling up beside him until all hell breaks loose when multiple versions of himself appear in the car and begin to overwhelm him. It makes for moving viewing, a reflects the songs feeling of oppression well. Carner hasn’t said a great deal about the track as yet, but ultimately the mystique works in his favour. An obvious and bold side step from the often care-free and chill feeling on a lot of his previous work, the boy wonder from Croyden is back with a loud and abrasive boom that indicates an exciting new direction.
