THE MERCURY PRIZE WINNERS THROUGH THE YEARS

The Mercury Prize prize has continued to celebrate and promote the best in British and Irish music, across a range of contemporary music genres, often with some unexpected choices.

Last year’s Mercury Music Prize winner was Michael Kiwanuka, with his third album, Kiwanuka. He beat Dua Lipa, Laura Marling and Stormzy, but had to be happy with accepting the award live on The One Show, rather than at the usual ceremony surrounded by – and celebrating with – his peers. Having been nominated for both of his previous albums, though, he was thrilled to finally win.

The judging panel were unanimous, hailing the album as ‘classic yet contemporary… dealing with hot button topics like race and identity but in a reflective way that draws the listener in. Warm, rich, hugely accomplished and belonging to no one genre but its own, Kiwanuka is a masterpiece.’

Mercury Prize 2021 Nominees

After a fraught year for the music industry, the 2021 judging panel’s choices – including some of the year’s biggest sellers – are brilliantly eclectic, ranging from jazz, soul and rap to electronic, contemporary classic and grime. Plus 10 of the 12 artists have albums nominated for the first time. How much do you win for the Mercury Prize? A cool £25,000. Let’s see who’s in contention…

Arlo Parks

Singer-songwriter and BRIT Best Breakthrough Artist award-winner Arlo Parks’ Collapsed in Sunbeams is, ‘a series of vignettes and intimate portraits surrounding my adolescence and the people that shaped it. I want it to feel both universal and hyper specific’.

Berwyn

Rapper, songwriter and producer Berwyn came third in the BBC’s Sound of 2021 poll. Demotape/Vega is intimate, intricate and raw, made with the bare minimum of equipment, whilst he was living in a bedsit.

Black Country, New Road

For the First Time – the London-based group’s debut features satirical lyrics, piano, saxophone, violin and even Jewish klezmer music.

Celeste

Soul singer Celeste scooped the BBC Sound of 2020 gong, following it up with the BRIT Rising Star award. Not Your Muse is for you if there’s a big Adele/Amy Winehouse-shaped gap in your playlist.

Floating Points, Pharoah Sanders & The London Symphony Orchestra

Promises – Sam Shepherd is a DJ, musician and producer of electronic music under the moniker Floating Points. Legendary saxophonist Pharoah Sanders is such is a big fan, he agreed to team up with Shepherd on Promises, an ambient record consisting of a single musical composition divided into nine movements.

Ghetts

Conflict of Interest – if you’re a fan of previous Mercury winner Dave’s Psychodrama, then the grime artist’s third album will be right up your street. Featuring honest tales of London living, this is both smart and sombre.

Hannah Peel

Love the space-age oddities created by Delia Derbyshire? Hannah Peel is an artist to check out. Fir Wave takes electronic music and digital sounds and uses them to celebrate natural phenomena.

Laura Mvula

All of Laura Mvula’s albums have now been nominated for the prize. Pink Noise has been described by the NME as, ‘sparkling, 80s-style ear candy’. Recreate your own John Hughes movie scenes with this selection of absolute pop and funk bangers.

Mogwai

As well as being their first album to receive a Mercury Prize nod, As the Love Continues was Mogwai’s first album to reach No. 1 in the UK. According to Uncut, its cinematic post-rock ‘bristles with the unruly energies that enlivened their younger incarnations’.

Nubya Garcia

Source sees award-winning jazz saxophonist and composer Nubya Garcia expanding on her jazz roots, incorporating dubstep, reggae, Colombian cumbia, calypso, hip hop, soul and African-diasporic sounds.

Sault

No photos, no interviews, no videos or live appearances: Sault are a bona fide mystery. Untitled (Rise) is the neo-soul collective’s fourth album in 18 months – and was their second double album in just over 12 weeks. Its influences cover house, disco, post-punk funk and 80s boogie, but its lyrics are unflinching, filled with anger, resistance and protest.

Wolf Alice

Can Wolf Alice bag a second Mercury Prize? Produced by Arcade Fire-collaborator Markus Dravs, Blue Weekend sees the London-based indie-rockers hopping between folk, garage rock and shoegaze, ‘only now they’re steering deeper into the corners and controlling the skids’ (Independent).

Previous Winners of the Mercury Music Prize

Spanning almost every genre imaginable, the Mercury Prize has often gone to debut albums, and the judging panels are equally fond of incredibly personal offerings.

From pop to hip hop, art-rock to dance, ‘boffin rock’ to an album ‘so jaw-droppingly advanced it should sound out a secret “album of the year” message when played backwards’, which of the winners do you still have on your Spotify? Our ranking is based on total sales, according to the OfficialCharts.com.

Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not – Arctic Monkeys (2006)

Were the Arctics the first ‘social media band’? The gang from Sheffield, led by charismatic frontman Alex Turner, released several of the album’s tracks for free via the internet, in late 2004. By the time it came to the official release of their first single, ‘I Bet That You Look Good on the Dancefloor’, the fans, press and the music industry were all massively behind them. Seamlessly blending indie rock, garage rock, post-punk revival and Britpop with endlessly witty lyrics, the album became the fastest-selling debut album in British music history, and has since gone six times platinum in the UK.

Want to relive your heady youth? The thrashing drums and crunching opening chords of ‘I Bet That You Look Good on the Dancefloor’ are still guaranteed to get you pogoing along in a total frenzy.

Franz Ferdinand – Franz Ferdinand (2004)

Scottish indie art-rockers Franz Ferdinand’s album features the singles ‘Take me Out’, ‘The Dark of the Matinee’ and ‘Michael’ and was also nominated for Best Alternative Album at the Grammy Awards. Pitchfork praised its lyrics, ‘bearing surprising satire, wit and unabashed romance’.

‘Dark of the Matinee’ sees a rare pop mention of chatshow king and Radio 2 legend Terry Wogan, which dates it a tad, but their ‘dueling guitars with occasional keyboard’ stylings created the kind of tracks that still make you want to bounce up and down waving your arms around.

The Seldom Seen Kid – Elbow (2008)

The Seldom Seen Kid was the first Elbow album to be entirely self-produced, mixed and recorded. ‘Grounds for Divorce’ has been a hugely successful track in terms of sync, appearing everywhere from Top Gear to a trailer for the Coen Brothers’ Burn After Reading; a promo for House and on the soundtrack for the video game Driver: San Francisco. And if you haven’t seen an uplifting montage on TV accompanied by ‘One Day Like This’, then you must have been living in a particularly remote cave.

Frontman Guy Garvey described winning the Mercury Prize as, ‘the best thing that’s ever happened to us’ (they’d been nominated previously in 2001 for debut album Asleep in the Back.) The band also won Best British Group at the 2009 Brit Awards and picked up two statuettes at the 2009 Ivor Novello Awards for ‘Grounds for Divorce’ and ‘One Day Like This’.

Elegant Slumming – M People (1994)

Including no fewer than four top 10 UK singles, the second album by M People spent 87 weeks on the Top 75. ‘Moving on Up’ was the biggest hit (reaching number two), with ‘Don’t Look Any Further’ and ‘Renaissance’ following close behind.

Perhaps the most notable thing about M People’s win is the two 90s classics they beat: Prodigy’s Music for the Jilted Generation and Blur’s Parklife.

xx – The xx (2010)

xx’s minimalist arrangements are built around beats, basslines, sparse guitar and reverb, and are mostly sung as low-key duets by Romy Madley Croft and Oliver Sim. Originally a sleeper hit, the emotional lyrics about love, loss, intimacy and desire eventually found the band its fanbase – helped along by several of the tracks being licensed for TV – and, of course, the Mercury Prize win.

The dream-pop sound is reminiscent of Portishead, Mazzy Star and the Cocteau Twins and the album appeared on several critics’ lists of the year’s best albums. The Guardian named it the year’s best album in their critics’ poll, with Tim Jonze praising it as, ‘more than just the sound of 2009, it was a distinctive musical statement of the like we may never get to hear again.’ No wonder the Mercury judges awarded it the prize.

An Awesome Wave – Alt-J (2012)

It may have peaked at No. 13 on the UK charts, but Alt-J’s debut not only claimed the Mercury Prize in 2012, but was also named Album of the Year at the Ivor Novello Awards. Its smart art-rock – on singles including ‘Tesselate’ and ‘Matilda’ – made it the favourite to win that year.

With lyrics that reference Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are, Hubert Selby’s Last Exit to Brooklyn, and Natalie Portman’s character in Leon (‘Matilda’), it was a more cerebral album than most (the four members met at Leeds University). An Awesome Wave may not have quite opened the door for ‘boffin rock’, as some were predicting, but as the Guardian remarked, ‘if Heston Blumenthal were ever set loose in a recording studio, he would likely come up with something like this’ – which definitely means it merits another listen.

Boy in Da Corner – Dizzee Rascal (2003)

Noughties superstar Dizzee Rascal largely self-produced his debut as well as writing and performing it – aged only 17, he became the award’s youngest ever recipient. Young Dylan Mills rose through the garage scene as a member of the Roll Deep Crew and many argue that Boy in Da Corner is grime’s first proper album. The lyrics reflected teenage life on an east London council estate – a mix of the brash and the bleak with flashes of humour.

Given that Dizzee became such a mainstream star that he appeared at the opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympics, music critic Alexis Petridis’s view underestimated our appetite for grime.‘Whether anybody will listen seems questionable. Both Dizzee Rascal’s music and message are wildly unpalatable, and the British record-buying public is not currently renowned for wild risk-taking. If they ignore Boy in da Corner, however, they may well be ignoring the most original and exciting artist to emerge from dance music in a decade.’ The Mercury Prize definitely helped to put Dizzee on every music fan’s map.

Psychodrama – Dave (2019)

Fearless and bold, Dave is a rapper who’s unafraid to court controversy and tackle the big subjects, whether it’s racial identity (on ‘Black’) or an abusive relationship (‘Lesley’). Psychodrama is structured as a concept album and is often a tough listen, with unflinching, self-aware lyrics. The tracks are deeply personal and marked the 20-year-old out as one of the names to watch in UK hip hop.

His new album, We’re All Alone in this Together, was released at the end of July and scored the biggest album launch of the year (beating Olivia Rodrigo’s Sour.)

Konnichiwa – Skepta (2016)

As one of the key architects of grime, British rapper Skepta had no problem pulling in all the big names for his fourth studio album, including Wiley, Pharrell Williams, and little bro JME.

It was acclaimed by the NME as ‘a landmark in British street music, a record good enough to take on the world without having to compromise one inch in the process.’ Skepta beat David Bowie, Radiohead and Kano to take home the Mercury.

Visions of a Life – Wolf Alice (2018)

The North London four-piece created an emotional whirlwind on their second album, as they charted relationship milestones from developing crushes to deep lust, through to extreme bitterness. The NME loved the 12 eclectic tracks so much, they declared it was, ‘a record so bold, brave and jaw-droppingly advanced it should sound out a secret “album of the year” message when played backwards’.

It’s got everything from spoken word to punk, thundering guitars to cinematic, swirling melody to gospel and folk.

Overgrown – James Blake (2013)

Blake’s debut narrowly missed out on the Mercury two years before, but Overgrown’s disembodied vocals and eerie, neo-dubstep saw off Laura Mvula and Artic Monkeys.

You’d be hard-pressed to beat critic Ben Beaumont-Thomas’s description of Overgrown, so we won’t attempt to: ‘His querulous voice, and the curling briar-stem melodies he applies it to, has its closest analogue in Billie Holiday on Lady in Satin. As with that album, state-of-the-art production is a rich, generous backing for minimalist songwriting, where papery ribbons of melody get caught in uncaring draughts, and scales tread carefully as if negotiating a broken staircase… hope and longing swing upward, are briefly lit, and then pad softly down into a dim world of inner brooding.’

Dead – Young Fathers (2014)

A Liberian/Nigerian/Scottish experimental hip hop trio wouldn’t be everyone’s first choice, but then the Mercury Prize isn’t just there to celebrate mainstream success, but to shine a light on genres and albums that might not be on heavy rotation via the usual channels.

Swinging from rap onslaughts to soaring soul, spoken word to overlapping harmonies, Dead is an album to keep you on your toes.

So there you have it – all the Mercury Prize winners, together with the 2021 shortlist. See you on the 9th September for the reveal of this year’s winner! And if you’re looking for an eclectic range of music, then check out our hand-picked playlists – we have a track for you in literally every genre!

Be sure to check out our blog for more insightful articles, the latest news, inspiration for your next project and industry expertise.