19-year-old South London rapper and heartbreaker Loyle Carner is Britain's most recent new hope in hip-hop. With a voice that's wise and cracked beyond his years and a restless flow, he blew open the doors to the mostly abandoned scene with his A Little Late EP a couple of months back - which, if you haven't heard it yet, is well worth downloading now.
As part of a series to celebrate the latest nominees for the Turner Prize, the presitigious British visual art award, Tate Collective London asked Carner to create a track in response to the work of Tris Vonna-Michell, who's known for his circuitous spoken word narratives and installations made up of scattered ephemera. Carner has responded in kind: "Baby Grey" is nostalgic but sparse, with scattered guitar twangs forming a gloomy backdrop to his musings on a dwindling romance. It's got that same circuitous feeling in that Carner doesn't draw any conclusions—only reflects his own spiralling, confused state of mind in snapshot memories and pretty sketches—but the dexterity of his unravelling verses lets you know that really, he's always in control.
