Hope Tala kicks off 2025 with a poignant new single ‘Phoenix’
The new year begins on a high note with the release of Phoenix - the latest single from rising songstress Hope Tala, ahead of her highly anticipated debut album, Hope Handwritten, slated for release on February 28, 2025, via PMR Records. This new release will usher in the year with its divine euphonic quality, further showcasing Hope’s ability to craft uniquely individual songs that unite into a cohesive listening experience.
Alongside the release is the long-awaited launch of pre-orders for physical formats of Hope Handwritten. The album is available to pre-order on CD and special double eco black vinyl now from retailers worldwide, plus Hope’s webshop. There are also a number of very limited prints signed by Hope available from select stores.
Speaking on Phoenix, Hope states:
“Sometimes, when I’m writing a song, I’m not thinking how it might fit onto a project - I’m writing instead with the intention of confessing a feeling or communicating something significant to someone I love. I wrote ‘Phoenix’ for my best friend while we were separated geographically after a long period of time seeing each other every day, in an attempt to express some of what our friendship means to me. It was of course inevitable that this song, which is about how friendship has lifted me from darkness into hope, would eventually find its way onto Hope Handwritten.”
Listen to Phoenix HERE
2024 was a transformative year for Hope marked by the release of several critically acclaimed singles leading up to her highly anticipated debut album, Hope Handwritten, which drops on February 28, 2025. Some highlights of her 2024 milestones include completing a "Mini Tour" with sold-out headline shows in London, NYC, and LA, being featured on Barack Obama’s 2024 Summer Playlist for the 3rd time with her single ‘I Can’t Even Cry’, and being announced as a special guest for five dates on ZAYN’s 2025 US Tour. With the album’s release just around the corner, 2025 is set to mark a pivotal chapter in Hope's career.
Anchored by Tala’s velvety-smooth vocals and complemented by delicate acoustic guitar, Phoenix exemplifies the beauty of minimalism while maintaining the emotional power for which Hope is known for. The song explores themes of resilience and adaptability, encapsulated in the lyric, “Don’t break, just bend ‘ - a sentiment woven delicately into the track’s minimalist yet rich arrangement.
As the seventh track revealed from the album, Phoenix adds another layer to Hope’s growing repertoire, further building anticipation for Hope Handwritten. Speaking on the album, Hope explains:
The title contains multiple meanings ; I write most of my lyrics by hand in a notebook, hence handwritten, and I’ve put so much of my heart and soul into this music, where the self-titled element came from- but it also communicates what I believe is the crux of the record, which is the struggle to hold on to the feeling of hope.
More on Hope Tala…
Hope Tala is emerging from her very own cultural reset. Making her mark crafting an intimate musical language that feels equal parts romantic and philosophical, the 27-year-old West Londoner, now based between the capital and LA, has made her return to the scene with the brooding single ‘I Can’t Even Cry’ as her first release since 2022 and as a newly independent artist for the first time since signing to Universal in 2020. “I’ve really had the opportunity to grow as an artist and a human being and have certain experiences that I wouldn't have been able to catalogue [back then],” she says. The Hope of today is in the midst of a coming of age that also feels like a homecoming, something explored in technicolour on her upcoming project. As she enters this thrilling next stage of her career, seamlessly weaving together organic, live musical textures and musings on heartbreak, newfound love, ancestry, introspection, humanity and community.
Self-taught on the guitar aged 14, raised on the silken tones of Lauryn Hill, Erykah Badu and D’Angelo and the razor-sharp words of Maya Angelou, Zadie Smith, Sylvia Plath and Toni Morrison, her own balmy poetic soundscapes have already gained her fans in everyone from Dazed and Billboard to Barack Obama through to the HBO team behind the new gen Gossip Girls remake. Yet with all the transformation and growth of the last few years for the British-Jamaican songwriter, the warm, glowing heart and whimsy of Hope’s signature still remains intact - a place to escape to and feel both soothed and seen. “The most powerful thing that I feel when I listen to music that I love is that it’s somewhere I want to be, I want to live in it,” she says. Her own utopia would be one of perpetual summer, no police, no prisons and free education, she jokes. “But I would love people to see themselves or something they recognise in it, and also to want to come back to it and live in it in that way too.”
Pre-save Hope Tala’s debut album ‘Hope Handwritten’ below: