In Hawaiian culture, there is the phrase kani ka pila – the invitation to jam together in your backyard. Its essence is rooted to the Hawaiian spirit itself: the way that music and its easy sense of community are irrevocably bound together. There might be two or three guitars, a scattering of ukuleles, a homemade washtub pakini bass, and someone on spoons to hold down the rhythm – a spontaneous, freeform blend of instruments until the small hours of the morning.

This is the energy Hawaiian-born singer-songwriter Eli Smart seeks to capture in his second EP, Aloha Soul. It’s a title that is both a self-coined genre and an ineffable feeling that shares no English parallel, and across its five tracks, it’s something Eli seeks to define.

Emerging with his debut project Boonie Town in 2021, his sound fused blue-eyed soul with the tropics of his home Kauai. With its playful melodies, it feels as gentle as a warm breeze in your hair; it’s as easy on the ears as the island’s infinite horizons are on the eyes. To listen to Eli Smart is to surrender to its peaceful rhythms, its ‘Polynesian drift’.

But while Aloha Soul was wreathed in a certain optimism, it was written at a time of turbulence in Eli’s life. At eighteen-years-old, he would uproot his entire life to attend university in Liverpool, the fabled city that birthed his greatest influence, The Beatles. While the music scene in Kauai was confined to light-hearted jams and beach parties, Liverpool offered a hive of like-minded creatives and a circuit anchored in an illustrious history. Drunk on the thrill of it all, Eli would carve out his sound with as many bands on as many open-mic nights he could involve himself with, all the while building an armoury of tunes that would draw larger and larger audiences. The strength of this live reputation and the release of his sleepy, sun-kissed debut single “Come On, Come On, Come On” earned the attention of Polydor. Having signed along the dotted line, it was all starting to happen for Eli Smart.

But within the very same week, the UK declared its first national lockdown, and Eli had to leave the country and the life he’d built with no certainty of when he’d ever return. Aloha Soul was born of this period of precarity, of transition, where there was the sense that nothing would ever be quite the same. But one thing remained constant: Kauai. Without tourists, Eli could experience his home in its purest sense. “It’s put me in an altered state,” he remarks. “The outside world felt very, very far away. There was this scary, but peaceful realisation that you’re not in control, that you’ve gotta go with the flow.” Returning home was like a much-needed exhale.

“It was a weird combination of escaping through music, while hopefully addressing some shit through it,” Eli explains of the EP. Converting his childhood bedroom into a studio, he invited Mercury Prize winning producer Gianluca Buccellati (Arlo Parks, Lana Del Rey, Biig Piig) to help bring these five sketches to life – the first time he had ever collaborated with a professional. In a suspended reality, they would fall into a sleepy, blissful routine of waking up, making their way to a friend’s bakery (where Eli has a bagel named after him), and begin writing songs together. The only interruptions would be interludes to jump in the water and surf, Eli’s twin passion: another way to escape the lethargic, circular rhythms of the day-to-day.

Together, Eli and Gianluca would blend today’s technology with an analogue mentality. They weren’t interested in producing immaculate sounds, but rather chased the timeworn crackles, an instrument’s whims, the rasp of Eli’s voice. It lends his music a quality that is altogether timeless, beholden to no single era, and yet evocative of all of them. Between rhythmic guitar and sugar-coated melodies, largely indebted to Eli’s adoration of The Beatles, you will also hear the sounds of Hawaii itself: falsetto harmonies, lap steel guitars, slide guitars and ukulele.

Aloha Soul – just like Eli himself – is a direct product of its environment. Opening track “B-side” was written in London the summer the pandemic briefly loosened its grip; he had just broken up with his girlfriend after the forced separation put a strain on their relationship. While many of Eli’s songs sound as if they are wreathed in sunlight, “B-Side” is deceptive, a track of resignation beneath those easy-going grooves. “We were never gonna make it that far,” he sings: a shrug thinly veiled in a soaring falsetto. At the time, he didn’t like the track, but recording it with Gianluca in Kauai accentuated qualities in the track that lay beyond London’s influence.

There was a certain inevitability to Eli Smart becoming a musician. Since he was born, it has encompassed almost every facet of his life: it was a fact of his family, a unifying force in his friendships. His grandmother belonged to the pioneering all-female rock band Ace of Cups, who raised Eli with stories of touring with Jimi Hendrix and their adventures during the ‘summer of love’; his grandfather is a “jazz wizard” who opened for Duke Ellington, who shares in Eli’s affinity with creating universes from his instruments. His mother is a beautiful singer and songwriter who helped him pen lyrics even as a child, and his father, a jazz guitarist, taught him how to play. In and out of bands throughout his childhood, Eli would spend his free time helping at his family’s record shop and music venue – the only of its kind on the island.

“AM to PM” is a love letter to returning home to his friends and family, the sweet taste of unreality and a return to a simple way of living that made the state of the world beyond more bearable. Eli sampled the gentle patter of rainfall on the roof of his childhood home: a subtle but striking testament to the way his roots are woven into the EP’s tapestry. With hazy harmonies and dozing rhythms, it’s the soundtrack to chasing sunrise and sunsets, cruising around the island with his friends, blasting Donny Hathaway and Gladys Knight out of the sound system. Eli’s first car was a companion unlike any other: a 1981 Mercedes Benz, white with leather seats and a sunroof. He saved for it relentlessly. After donating the car to the local university’s engineering course, he would later discover the car had been totaled and abandoned, but “Baby Benzing”, a song that unspools like a daydream, is an ode to that car and all the memories he made with it.

Yet, for all of Aloha Soul’s rose-tinted reveries, there is also an undercurrent of knowing that the broader picture isn’t quite so pretty. “Crying At The Comedy” is a confrontation of privilege, of ignorance – the moments when Eli would feel alienated rather than enchanted on the island. “There are so many people back home who didn’t even believe in Covid or were so far removed from the reality in their sanctuary that they didn’t take any responsibility for the gravity of the situation,” he explains. “It was tough and frustrating sometimes, people living in this beautiful paradise acting like they’re in la-la land.”

It’s the final track, “See Through”, that is undoubtedly Eli’s favourite. With its baritone guitar, thick percussion and dreamy melodies, it’s the one that best conjures a feeling of home that vocabulary can’t hope to capture. “See Through is a tune that my mate Luca and I wrote and recorded back home in my little studio on Kauai. I had the intro guitar riff floating around for a while as well as a bouncy groove and a melody and I brought it to Luca and we wrote the tune around it together.”  Words might fail us, but for Eli Smart, the music says it all.