More about: Dylan Cartlidge

An album six years in production; a message a lifetime in the making. Hope Above Adversity is much more than an album for Dylan Cartlidge; it’s a mantra he’s been working towards his whole life. “To be in a position where I can release a body of work, realise a life dream, realise my life’s work has been crazy”, he says of the positive response to the album.

Mixing hip-hop, gospel and freestyle rap to give you a burst of sunshine and an insight into his own personality, Dylan is the artist we all need to hear right now.

The message of Hope Above Adversity has become a lot more universal than Dylan’s own personal experiences, but they are what formed the basis of the album. “This is my mantra, it’s who I am,” he said. "It’s a message that my future self (which is now my past self) gave to a past version of me. When I was a kid, growing up I had a really difficult childhood, a really traumatic childhood. I was raised in social care in and out. I had experienced abuse, trauma and I was voiceless. I came to a fork in the road where it was either gonna go down a negative route, I was gonna be on drugs or prison or worse. I tried my hardest to use music to express myself in a way that hopefully could be helpful to others or could be a little bit of a note to myself”.

The final hurdle came in the form of a global pandemic, which forced him to finish the record from his laundry room. “If anyone needed a pair of pants or some bread or something, I had to redo vocal takes”, he adds.

Dylan's effervescent charm shines through in our conversation as much as it does in his music. He talks at breakneck speed, explaining his points through frequent movie references and video game comparisons. But what can you expect from a Cartlidge performance, when the time finally comes later this year? The highlight of his pre-Covid shows, as he tells Gigwise, might surprise you.

“I got my fiancée to come down to a gig in my hometown. She was like 'I can’t just put my life on hold whenever you’ve got a gig'. She got there and there’s always this part in the middle of the set where I do a freestyle and I had a ring in my back pocket and at the end of the freestyle proposed. Everybody went wild, we got it on film. It was just such a special moment”.

Of course, there’s not going to be a proposal in the middle of every show. But it just goes to show that if you get tickets to see Dylan Cartlidge you should expect the unexpected from his freestyle-heavy performance style. Inspired by noughties rock stars and more recent names like Anderson .Paak, Dylan wants to reach even more dizzying heights at his gigs. “I thought I would go on some Lord of the Rings/Hobbit-esque mission to be able to play the bass and rap at the same time in an Anderson .Paak fashion and that’s what you can expect from a live show” he says, laughing that he’ll just keep on adding instruments until it gets too much.

Did the freestyle proposal not warm your heart? Well, we dare you not to crack a smile at his recent music video for ‘Anything Could Happen’. Set in an animated world, an 8-bit Dylan battles monsters, killer pigeons and meddling dogs to find his beloved sunglasses. The result is pure genius, but he wasn’t always sure it was going to turn out the way he imagined. “I got the first edit and I saw this pigeon that had teeth and I was like 'hang on a second, I don’t know if this is really cool or if this is like the Tommy Wiseau’s The Room version of that idea'”.

Although his debut album is based on personal experiences of adversity, escapism is still as massive part of the music Dylan makes. “For me you sit down for a film or sometimes you put an album on to escape and go to a different planet. That is very much my view on art,” he says, “Art reflects real life but in a way that makes people forget they’re in real life”. So if you want to listen to Hope Above Adversity as a way of reflecting on your own journey, that’s fine, but Dylan stresses that “If you just wanna listen to it and shake your booty you can too, you know? There’s a lot of that in there, it’s groovy, it’s fun”.

And soon enough you’ll be able to do that at Dylan Cartlidge’s live shows later on in the year, his first live ventures in a post-Covid industry. He’s overcome the challenges, including the final hurdle of recording an album around pants and frozen bread, and he’s come out the other side. And that’s the message we all need as we emerge from our homes into a brand new world this year.

Hope Above Adversity is out now.

More about: Dylan Cartlidge