Forget about bravado, pretence, or affectation when it comes to Loyle Carner. His music, though ducking and diving with dexterous colliding syllables and carefully weighted words, is about telling the truth, however difficult or raw it may be. “It’s a very important thing, honesty,” he reasons. “Someone was asking me what it takes to be a good rapper, and they were looking for a really straight-edge answer, and I was like, ‘Just have something to say.’ If you have a story to tell, and you tell it, you’re a good rapper. Doesn’t matter how you tell it. For me, that’s the idea, to move someone.”

From the very beginning, Ben’s music has done just that, and people instantly began to connect; either identifying with his experiences directly, or finding themselves caught unawares and off-guard by his honesty. Many videos he’s released so far star his mum (something of a celebrity presence at his recent show at London’s KOKO) and brother Ryan, and they’re all self-directed too. Though it’s a massive creative undertaking, he’s fairly modest about the whole thing. “Otherwise I’d just be walking my dog or playing football,” he laughs. His music gives endless intimate glimpses into his own world, too, reaching the added depths that cameras darting around his Croydon home can’t plume. The laid-bare ‘BFG’ sees him exposing still fresh grief shortly after his stepdad’s passing, atop a sample of Donnie & Joe Emerson’s ‘Baby’, in strained, teared-up vocals. His voice, at times, sounds close to collapsing.

At first, he thought it might be a bit too much to release, but was thankfully persuaded otherwise by his go-to collaborator and “surrogate big brother” Rebel Kleff. “I put it out, and the response for it was mad,” he remembers. “People were coming back to me very positively, just saying ‘Thanks, I needed to hear this.’ It moved me in ways I can’t really describe. I found it very tricky because it’s so close to home,” Loyle admits. “‘The Isle of Arran’,” he says, referencing a single from his soon-imminent debut album ‘Yesterday’s Gone’ (due out on 20th January), “is the same, it’s also quite raw.” Revisiting snapshots of visiting his late grandad up in Scotland - “the only place I was kind of taught anything remotely manly, by a man. It’s the one time I got any stern advice,” he says – it’s typically, devastatingly honest. “It still scares me to this day,” he admits. “It’s still scary to perform them, because you’ve got to revisit the same stuff. It’s important, though,” he concludes. “It helped me find meaning in a few things that didn’t seem like they had a meaning at the time.”

As a kid, a young Ben Coyle-Larner used to watch hip hop music channel Channel U (now Channel AKA) religiously. “Grime was on the rise for the first time ‘round. My biological dad, and my cousins and that, were all listening to American hip hop, 90s stuff.” It didn’t always connect with him easily, he readily admits. “But when I first started hearing grime, there was this London accent,” he smiles. “Grime is people doing things on their own terms. People saying no to things, the considered approach. People offer you the world, and you go, ‘No, I don’t want it yet.’ Carry that weight. It’s how the grime guys do things, and it’s the only way you can run things, my grandad always taught me that. Only ever do things on your own terms. It’s easier.”

Rap, and writing in general, has always been the place where Loyle Carner finds both meaning, and the space for reflection. “People would always say, ‘Ben raps, Ben raps,’” he remembers, looking back. “In the playground we used to have rap battles. It was all just for fun. From when I can remember, I was rapping. I really used to struggle at school with essays, or anything that wasn’t creative writing, but creative writing I could do all day,” he says. “It didn’t feel like work to me, so I used to go above and beyond. But yeah, it was either rap or be killed. Everyone I know from when I was young at primary school rapped until they left secondary school. Or at least had a 16 of verse,” he adds. “It’s just what we did. Chill, have a beer, load up a beat.”

“I’m very impulsive with writing,” he continues. “I get a chance to think about what I’m going to say. Me writing words and poems and whatnot is the only time I have space where I can think about what to say, and say the right thing. I always say the wrong thing, like,” he pauses to crack a wide beam, “in interviews. In my songs, I say the right thing, or at least, I say how I really feel. It’s here to clear up all the things I said wrong, or did wrong. I’m going to right this wrong by writing this right,” he says, rounding things off with usual conciseness.