With the return of one of the UK’s most prestigious music awards tonight, this year’s Mercury prize nominees are by far a collection of the most diverse, sonically far-reaching artists the ceremony has ever seen.
While there is no folk or metal this year, shining examples of jazz, soul, classical, rap and rock records have made the shortlist, with 10 of 12 of the artists being nominated for the first time. 2021’s Mercury awards is the first to implement the rule change brought about by Japanese-British pop singer Rina Sawayama, whose debut album was disqualified because she didn’t hold a British passport.
East London rapper BERWYN is the first to benefit from the new rule, which states that people who have been resident in the UK or Ireland for more than five years are deemed eligible. This shortlist, more than any other, is a testament to how we are all culturally richer when no background or experience is discounted. Each of these albums is a perfect encapsulation of the turbulence of the times we live in, offering relief, catharsis, comfort and moments of joy.
Arlo Parks – Collapsed in Sunbeams
Arlo Parks is a living testament that age doesn’t beget wisdom. The long-awaited debut album of the 21-year-old West London singer-songwriter, Collapsed in Sunbeams, derived its name from Zadie Smith’s novel On Beauty, which Parks chose for the sentence’s devastating beauty. Her own record is filled with that kind of poetic justice, crafting lyrics that are smooth and rounded like perfect stones to put in your pocket. She is in equal measure a poet as she is a musician, deftly capturing generational anxiety and her own coming-of-age story. It’s a universal, and yet incredibly personal window into a world of the agony of the first flush of queer love, navigating mental illness and the darker moments of self-doubt, while basking in the sunshine of optimism for a brighter future.
Berwyn – Demotape/Vega
East London rapper BERWYN’s debut mixtape Demotape/Vega is a document of trauma and triumph: a record of the Black experience in a country that systemically stacks the odds against you and the white-knuckled desperation to survive and overcome. Born in Trinidad but having been raised in Romford, Demotape/Vega channels that feeling of displacement where a sense of belonging is lost, fending for himself from a young age while his mother was in and out of jail, leading to bouts of homelessness and struggle. Demotape/Vega came as a lifeline. Recorded on the floor of his rundown apartment in two weeks, BERWYN reckons with his demons over raw, piano-driven instrumentals where he sweats out his bars and his story like a fever. It’s a rare and imperative album that demands to be heard.
Black Country, New Road – For the first time
Black Country, New Road’s six-track debut release is not so much an album as an experiment. Underpinned by a white-hot need to cram the self-scrutiny and wry observations of 22-year-old wordsmith Isaac Wood into minutes, the septet’s monologue-rock is riddled with an anxiety that grabs you by the collar and forces you to listen. For the first time (deliberately formatted not as a title but as the opening of a rambling tale) is a leading light of the fourth-wall breaking wave of British “sprechgesang”, where there are no singer-songwriters, but speaker-songwriters who use the medium of post-punk to be uncomfortably honest, sardonic and direct.
Caught in the liminal space between autofiction and poetry, the songs are few in number but stretch out in length, running rings around you with tales of drunken narrators, moneyed girlfriends, acrobats and crying children. It’s a wordy and theatrical endeavour, shamelessly giddy from its own pretension, never lost for words and always just a little out of reach.
Celeste – Not Your Muse
Celeste’s voice has become instantly recognisable. After topping the BBC’s annual Sound Of… poll in 2019 and winning a BRIT award as a talent to keep tabs on, as well as recording songs for Pixar’s Soul and last year’s John Lewis Christmas advert, the British-American’s star has been in ascent for long enough. Her debut album Not Your Muse is a bold statement of her identity as an artist, and more than delivers on the hype. The record is a breathlessly relatable excavation of the heart, melding her jazz-indebted brand of soul with balladry that demands introspection one moment, and outright escapism the next. Returning to a double-disc format of old, Celeste is timeless and yet an essential voice bringing an elegance to music that is so often missed.
Floating Points, Pharoah Sanders & The London Symphony Orchestra Promises
Promises is a homage to the simple act of listening. 80-year-old saxophonist Pharoah Sanders collaborated with Sam Shephard, the British producer and composer who records under the name Floating Points, on this celestial nine-act piece performed by The London Symphony Orchestra. Sanders found himself listening not so much to music, but to sound: the waves of water, an airplane taking off, tapping into an unspoken language capable of bouts of joy and despair as any other. Each of its nine numbered movements leads you naturally to the next, speaking volumes and transporting you to a different time and place in a way that is almost entirely independent of the words we lean on.
Ghetts – Conflict of Interest
Ghetts is a name that carries heritage – you can’t tell the story of grime without it. Yet Conflict of Interest is not a retrospective record trying to outpace a setting sun: 36-year-old Justin Clarke’s gaze is fixed firmly on a new horizon. “Let’s talk about legacy: I don’t care about nostalgia, my best years are ahead of me,” he declares, in a defiant statement of intent. Conflict of Interest flexes its muscles with a far-flung array of features, with the incendiary contributions from grime veterans Skepta, Stormzy and Giggs to the more unexpected additions of Ed Sheeran and Emeli Sande. For Ghetts, nothing is off the table: no genre inflection, no matter of the heart is out of the question. Far more than a musical exploration, bringing strings to rap in a way that has rarely been explored, this is a personal exorcism, waking up ghosts of old – lost love, jail time, childhood hardship – and, at last, laying them to rest.
Hannah Peel – Fir Wave
Fir Wave is the fourth record from Northern Irish composer, producer and broadcaster Hannah Peel. Having previously rubbed shoulders with collaborations from Paul Weller and Erland Cooper, Fir Wave, with its imperative, electronic pulse is, this time, unequivocally her own. The record is the sound of being cast adrift in the cosmos, an unfathomable fantasia that Peel, herself, has built from scratch to create a feeling of being out of touch with the earth’s natural rhythms. This experimental record taps into the feeling of foreboding and uncertainty in the midst of the climate crisis, crafting its own language to articulate feelings too unsettling to put into words.
Laura Mvula – Pink Noise
Laura Mvula’s third record Pink Noise was a sky-punching, rose-tinted ode to the frivolity of 80s disco, proving that the Birmingham-born artist is not only making a comeback, but taking back control of her narrative through joy. Though Pink Noise’s predecessor, 2016’s The Dreaming Room, was met with critical acclaim from winning her a MOBO, an Ivor Novello award and a Mercury Prize nomination, she was dropped from RCA Records only months later with an unceremonious seven-line email. This record was a long-awaited return, but there is nothing bitter to taste: Pink Noise is bombastic, bulletproof synth-pop of a thousand different textures and shades, acting in homage to bygone eras but staying refreshingly modern.
Mogwai – As the Love Continues
Scottish post-rock veterans Mogwai return with As the Love Continues, a record which elevates the inky, suffocating sense of proximity they build with their towering walls of sound to new, claustrophobic levels in a year when there was no escape. The band recorded the album locked down in Worcestershire while producer Dave Fridmann worked remotely from the US, and due to the conditions of its creation, the core of loneliness that gnaws at Mogwai’s sound is amplified; the heaviness is more relentless as they delve deeper into the darkness that has always been the band’s companion. After 25 years, 10 studio albums, countless EPs and an abundance of film scores, Mogwai are more bound up in their identity than ever, unleashing a sense of catharsis the world so sorely needed.
Nubya Garcia – SOURCE
An essential name in the thriving London jazz scene, tenor saxophonist Nubya Garcia released her debut album SOURCE which at last allows the Camden-raised instrumentalist to be the main character in the definitive telling of her own story. Nimble, vibrant and effortlessly smooth, Garcia’s arrangements tap into pulse of her city, bringing sounds to life that are crafted to bleed out onto the streets in the early hours. Weaving together classic jazz sensibilities with Afrobeat, neo-soul, electronic music and ambient nods, SOURCE is the melting-pot of sound that could only come from the immigrant experience. Filtering her Guyanese and Trinidadian roots through the lens of London, it is a stunning record of her heritage, her city and the artist she has become.
SAULT – Untitled (Rise)
Emerging from the abyss, shrouded in anonymity which is almost unheard of, funk collective SAULT reduce music to its most pure components: the sound and the message. With only a handful of carefully given facts available, with no one stepping forward to claim the five records which materialised in the space of two years – two of which, Untitled (Rise) and its sister record Untitled (Black Is), dropped in the space of twelve weeks as a gut reaction to the murder of George Floyd. Empowerment and resistance are woven into the DNA of Untitled (Rise), which breezes from disco to house to funk in a way that nods without emulating its predecessors. Here, the dancefloor is an escape, but the grooves can’t outrun SAULT’s demand: “Why do my people always die?”
Wolf Alice – Blue Weekend
Wolf Alice have grown up as their fans have grown with them. Their third record, Blue Weekend, is at last a channel ambitious enough for Ellie Rowsell’s acerbic wit and devastating sensitivity. Straying from the juvenile lineage of 10’s indie-rock that threatened to write off the band as a product of their time, Wolf Alice have spent four years executing their vision expansive enough to accommodate their accelerating world. Blue Weekend is a kitchen-sink drama capturing the twenty-something experience in all its agony and indulgence, while also documenting Rowsell’s unusual position as a woman in rock music as capable as any man, and yet still doubted. Wolf Alice are unapologetically bold, putting all their chips on the table, restlessly throwing themselves into an array of guitar-driven influences and settling on none of them. A dissatisfaction is built into the core of Blue Weekend, and rather than fighting it, Wolf Alice lean into it on a cinematic scale.
