LEI HOPE

With guitar chords sweeter than broken dates, an unflashy sincerity and a cracked copy of FL Studio, Manchester-based artist Lei Hope (government ID: Hope Chiguvo) is a disorienting prospect. Microdosing genres, his sound jitters somewhere between the deluxe-digital-age psychedelics of indie and R&B. Like a xanaxed Steve Lacy giving bedroom pop mouth-to-mouth, Hope creates hi-fi recordings for lo-fi hearts. Born in Zimbabwe and raised in Leeds, his textured, wide-ranging songs skip between sacred melodies and secular sentiment, all wrapped in a reality-check vocal. At times, his music flickers with a wobbly after-hours milieu, a mallsoft aspartame that displaces it in time. At others, it interlocks with bubble-funk basslines, 8-bit guitar crunch and drums rawer than emotion. “My guitar is like my musical calculator and compass.” he states, and there is a navigational intelligence to the way in which he uses the various shorelines of genre as jumping off points for his own compositions.