Hope Tala knows what it means to trust the process. The British-Jamaican artist’s soft-spoken neo-soul poetry has been drifting across airwaves and racking up streams since 2018. In that time, she’s snagged support slots for SZA, Zayn and Florence And The Machine, played Glastonbury festival (with Coachella coming this summer) and landed a coveted spot on former president Barack Obama’s songs of the year list – three times. But behind the scenes, the long-rising star has been quietly working away on her debut album, telling NME back in 2022 of her mission to be “as vulnerable as possible” with the project.
Now three years on, her patient pursuit for perfectionism pays off on ‘Hope Handwritten’. The whole album journeys through the gamut of messy emotions that come with opening yourself up to love and heartache in your twenties, which Tala narrates in her ever-intoxicating spoken word delivery on ‘Growing Pains’: “Tryna write about what’s in my heart / But I don’t even know where to start.”
At times these contemplations are staged like Shakespearean tragedy, as Tala addresses a lover who is “turning all your words to weapons / When I’m only asking questions” on ‘Breaking Isn’t What A Heart Is For’. But her lulling couplets and honeyed vowels can just as easily make a timeless breakup mantra like “I really dodged a bullet” sound fresh on the footloose ‘Thank Goodness’.
It’s this soulful embodiment of the former English lit student’s eloquent writing that makes this a record worthy of repeats. Her understated vocals blissfully simmer on ‘Fall Too Hard’, a lovesick pop-R&B fusion where she admits to being “impulsive” with her feelings. By the time we arrive at the weightless chorus of ‘Lose My Mind’, she’s practically floating in her infatuation as her silky falsetto drifts like a daydream. Even more impressive is her ability to mould her voice to blends of genres, from a lo-fi twist on old school garage with a dash of rap (‘Survival’), radio-ready pop grooves (‘Bad Love God’) to pared-back acoustics and swelling string sections (‘Phoenix’).
The run time might seem a tad lengthy to some, but it would prove hard to tire from a voice as listenable as Tala’s. ‘Hope Handwritten’ is an album for going through the growing pains of your twenties and accepting the unknown of it all, but never refusing to feel it; time will keep moving forward, and we simply have to go with it. Or, as Tala declares in ‘A Story To Tell/Where I Begin’: “Someday I’ll figure it out…Til then at least there’s a story to tell”.
