In the running: Nova Twins, Sam Fender, Little Simz and Harry Styles are all on this year’s shortlist
(Picture: Getty Images)One of the most talked-about music awards ceremonies is back — and, unsurprisingly, there’s plenty to talk about.
Billing itself as a celebration of the best British and Irish music from the last year, the Mercury Prize is one of the most prestigious accolades in the business. Styled as being more artistically informed than the commerically led likes of the BRITs and Grammys, the Mercuries are always the source of some controversy: either thanks to who they’ve included in the shortlist, or who they’ve left out.
This year will be no different. But what are the main talking points on this year’s 12-strong shortlist? Check the contenders out below, and read on to find out what struck us.
The Mercury Prize 2022 shortlist
- Fergus McCreadie Forest Floor
- Gwenno - Tresor
- Harry Styles - Harry’s House
- Jessie Buckley & Bernard Butler - For All Our Days That Tear the Heart
- Joy Crookes - Skin
- Kojey Radical - Reason to Smile
- Little Simz - Sometimes I Might be Introvert
- Nova Twins - Supernova
- Sam Fender - Seventeen Going Under
- Self Esteem - Prioritise Pleasure
- Wet Leg - Wet Leg
- Yard Act - The Overload
Rock is god (again)
Who said rock is dead? The genre may have had a distressingly visible, trilby-wearing identity crisis towards the tail end of the Noughties, and a hungover few years at the beginning of the 2010s, but it never really disappeared. And on this year’s shortlist, rock is, at least in a very loose sense, the presiding genre. There’s a healthy vareity — Sam Fender’s Glasto-slaying singalongs are a world away from Nova Twins’ nu-metal-meets-grime mash-ups; Yard Act’s wordy, spiky post-punk is distinct from Wet Leg’s snackable indie-pop-rock. It’s a sign of a genre in rude, eclectic health.
Women rule (again)
The Mercury Prize’s 2020 shortlist made history by choosing more women and women-fronted bands than men for the first time in 29 years. They’ve matched it in 2022 — four solo women (Little Simz, Self Esteem, Gwenno, Joy Crookes), two all-women bands (Nova Twins, Wet Leg) and the mixed-gender duo of Jessie Buckley and Bernard Butler — with only five men or men-fronted acts included. If male-dominated shortlists at award ceremonies aren’t already a relic, then the Mercury Prize is proof that they very much could (and should) be.
Harry Styles is officially the best One Direction member
In case the sold-out Wembley gigs, huge streaming numbers and general super-megastardom hadn’t already tipped you off, Harry Styles is having by far the best time of the post-One Direction era. He’s already got a bulging trophy cabinet — wins at the BRIT Awards, Grammys and Ivor Novellos far surpass those of his former bandmates — and now he’s on track to complete the collection for a Mercury Prize gong. Would it be a surprise for the supposedly left-field award to be handed to an all-out pop star? Yes. Is it beyond the realms of possibility? Certainly not.
Cornwall for the win?
Here’s a fact you can count on without trawling through a list of past winners: never before has a predominantly Cornish-language album triumphed at the Mercury Prize. Unsurprising, as only a handful of people still speak it fluently, but there’s an outside chance that Gwenno’s beguiling album Tresor could fly the flag for this ancient tongue. Sung entirely in Cornish, bar one song in Welsh, it’s a brilliant listen — prepare for a spike in Cornish dictionary sales if it does win.
Little Simz cements her spot as one of the greats
If the 2019 Mercury Prize hadn’t gone to the very worthy winner of Dave’s Psychodrama, it should certainly have been handed to Little Simz’s Grey Area. The fact that the Islington rapper has topped even that release with her most recent album, Sometimes I Might Be Introvert, and secured a second Mercury nomination, speaks volumes of an artist who continues to excel. The capital has produced some era-defining rappers over the decades — from Stormzy to Skepta, Ghetts to Giggs — and you can surely now add Little Simz to that pantheon.
Hurrah for token jazz!
It’s a running joke that each set of shortlists from the Mercury Prize will have the “token jazz” album chucked in there somewhere. With the revival of the genre in recent years, though, it’s been anything but a formality — albums such as Nubya Garcia’s Source, SEED Ensemble’s Driftglass and Sons of Kemet’s Your Queen Is a Reptile demanded their spots on the list. It doesn’t feel like a crime to think that, maybe, just maybe, the judges could include more than one jazz album. Alas, 2022 is not the year, and flying the flag this time round is Fergus McCreadie. More power to him.
Dynamic duos are back
For whatever reason — rampant Instagram-fuelled narcissism, the post-Jedward lull, who knows — musical duos have become unfashionable in recent times, with solo artists or fully-fledged bands taking precedence. But the double acts are firmly back on this year’s shortlist, with Wet Leg, Nova Twins, and Jessie Buckley and Bernard Butler all in the running. Sometimes, two will do.
Spare a thought for…
…Kae Tempest, Fontaines D.C., Dave and Black Country, New Road, all of whom had been named among the bookies’ favourites to win the Mercury Prize in 2022, but ultimately haven’t even been included on the shortlist. Such is the nature of a 12-strong competition, sadly. All of them released very good albums though — stick them on your to-listen list if you haven’t checked them out already.
