Mark SavageMusic correspondentGetty ImagesPulp and Wolf Alice are both former winners of the Mercury PrizeBritish band Wolf Alice have broken a Mercury Prize record by becoming the only act in the award’s 34-year history to be nominated for all of their first four albums.The quartet, who won in 2018 for second album Visions of a Life, have claimed their fourth nomination for The Clearing, an album rooted in the sounds of 1970s soft rock.Other nominees for the 2025 music prize include Pulp – also former winners – who are recognised for More, their first album in 24 years.At the age of 84, folk musician Martin Carthy becomes the oldest ever Mercury nominee – while viral pop star PinkPantheress’s adrenalin-inducing 20-minute mixtape Fancy That is thought to be the shortest ever nominated album.Getty ImagesPinkPantheress’s Fancy That lasts for a grand total of 20 minutes 33 secondsThe award, which recognises the best British or Irish album of the past 12 months, will be presented at a ceremony on 16 October.For the first time, the event will be held in Newcastle – as organisers address accusations that the prize had become too London-centric.Last year’s winners, Leeds-based rock band English Teacher, were the first act from outside the capital to lift the trophy in 10 years.By contrast, this year’s shortlist includes just one London act – Wolf Alice.Getty ImagesSam Fender will return home for the award ceremony in NewcastleSam Fender will be a home town favourite at this year’s ceremony after being nominated for the potent rock of his third album, People Watching.Jazz musician Joe Webb comes from Wales, and incorporates his country’s musical heritage (along with a love of Britpop) into his nominated album, Hamstrings and Hurricanes.Scotland’s Jacob Alon, meanwhile, is recognised for the heartbreaking gossamer ballads of their debut album, In Limerence.Getty ImagesCMAT has earned two consecutive Mercury nominations – for her second album Crazymad for Me, and this year’s Euro-CountryThe shortlist also features Irish rock band Fontaines DC for the menacingly beautiful Romance, and Irish iconoclast CMAT for her witty and vulnerable Euro-Country.The list is completed by alt-pop artist FKA Twigs, whose Eusexua is a concept record about the loss of self-consciousness; multi-instrumentalist Emma-Jean Thackray for Weirdo, a musical catharsis written in the midst of devastating grief; and Coventry rapper Pa Salieu for Afrikan Alien.Notable omissions this year include former winners Little Simz and Ezra Collective, whose albums Lotus and Dance, No-One’s Watching were met with rave reviews.The Cure’s long-awaited comeback, Songs Of A Lost World, also failed to make the cut, as did Self Esteem’s critically acclaimed A Complicated Woman.Full coverage of the prize will be available on BBC television, BBC Sounds, Radio 6 Music and BBC News. Here’s a potted guide to the Mercury Prize’s class of 2025.CMAT – Euro-CountryAWAL”I didn’t think I was going to make another record so quickly,” said CMAT of the follow-up to her Mercury nominated second album, Crazymad, For Me.”[But] when all these ideas started landing, I knew I needed to do this before I could do anything else.”Any fears that Euro-Country would be a cynical cash-grab sequel were quickly allayed. Every song packs a punch, whether she’s singing about the Irish financial crisis of 2008 or her irrational hatred of Jamie Oliver (“OK! Don’t be a bitch! The man’s got kids and they wouldn’t like this!” she sings.)Smart, subversive and funny, the album contains some painfully sharp observations on relationships and impossible beauty standards that had her “trying to wax my legs with tape” at the age of nine.Anyone who saw CMAT’s vivid festival performances this summer has already been won over. Euro-Country seals the deal.Emma-Jean Thackray – WeirdoParlophone”Making this record saved my life,” Emma-Jean Thackray told 10 Magazine of her second album, Weirdo.Written after her partner of 12 years unexpectedly died, the sprawling, soul-searching record finds Thackray re-examining every facet of her life as she tried to rebuild it.”I needed to find a way back to myself after being so lost and everything I am is music – nothing else matters,” she explained. “It’s a survival record – full of pain but also silliness.”Recorded alone in her south London flat, the album is surprisingly light on its feet. The jazz-funk grooves are trippily curvaceous, the harmonies transcendent. Borne of grief, it becomes a celebration of survival.FKA Twigs – EusexuaYoung / Atlantic RecordsInspired by underground raves, FKA Twigs’ third album is all about losing yourself in music – those moments of raw humanity, where you stop thinking and simply feel.Eusexua, she has said, is a word that describes “the tingling clarity” you get when you’re struck by a new idea, when you kiss a stranger, or even “the moment before an orgasm”.The album attempts to recreate that feeling with a series of abstract, futuristic soundscapes and deconstructed club tracks.They hypnotise and thrill, especially on Girl Feels Good, a whirling techno anthem that recalls Madonna’s Ray Of Light; and the appropriately titled Drums Of Death, which chops up 13-year-old K-Pop samples into a pneumatic celebration of sex.In mixing the cerebral with the sensual, Eusexua mostly succeeds – but occasionally the precision of Twigs’ vision suffocates the spontaneity she was aiming for.Fontaines DC – RomanceXL RecordingsThe fourth album by Dublin’s Fontaines DC sees the quintet take their scratchy, sinister sound and run it through a Technicolor filter.Where their previous albums were firmly rooted in Ireland, Romance was inspired by the neon lights of Tokyo and classic Japanese animation Akira, whose themes of nuclear era paranoia inform the band’s nervy guitar anthems.Lead single Starburster is a second-by-second account of a panic attack singer Grian Chatten experienced at London’s St Pancras Station. In The Modern World tackles the disillusionment of getting to Hollywood and discovering its seedy underbelly.Recorded after a US tour with the Arctic Monkeys, Romance saw Fontaines reach for a bigger audience without compromising their principles. “I didn’t want to write, like, a Champagne Supernova, but I did want to do something that felt like it was deep within and far without,” Chatten told the Guardian.The gamble paid off, with songs like Favourite and Bug ringing out around stadiums this summer – marking out Fontaines as the biggest guitar band of the 2020s.Jacob Alon – In LimerenceIsland RecordsFife’s Jacob Alon is possessed of an otherworldly voice – simultaneously angelic and tremulous with vulnerability.It’s used to heart-wrenching effect on their debut album, singing of the physical ache of unrequited love, over delicately strummed guitars and brushed drums.Fairy In A Bottle is a glorious bruise of a song, all about Alon’s capacity for self-deception: “I want to worship you before the hope expires.” Confession, meanwhile, captures the crushing confusion Alon felt when an ex-boyfriend denied all knowledge of their relationshipIn Limerence has earned the singer-songwriter rave reviews – as well as comparisons to Jeff Buckley and Adrianne Lenker – but the best response came from his mother.”She sent me a one-line message and said, ‘It’s like a dream I didn’t want to wake up from’,” he told the BBC earlier this year.Joe Webb – Hamstrings and HurricanesEdition RecordsA jazz album inspired by Britpop? Why the heck not.Hamstrings and Hurricanes marks the full-length debut of Welsh pianist Joe Webb, whose playful, improvisational style has already won the praise of Jamie Cullum and Jools Holland.He delivers a swinging, bluesy take on traditional jazz, playing off his long-serving sidemen (double bassist Will Sach and drummer Sam Jesson) in a series of semi-improvised song sketches, recorded live last year.The final track, Hiraeth, is a riff on Oasis’s Shakermaker – although you’d be hard-pressed to spot the similarities without a degree in musicology.The album’s title, meanwhile, is a tribute to Lionel Messi. Webb is a huge fan and used to fly to Barcelona to watch “La Pulga” in action every week.Now that Messi’s getting older, and has moved to Miami, Webb reckons the two biggest risks the footballer faces are pulling his hamstrings and surviving hurricane season.Martin Carthy – Transform Me Then Into a FishHEM RecordsThe father of the 1960s British folk scene, Martin Carthy was a direct influence on everyone from Bob Dylan and Paul Simon to Billy Bragg and Blur’s Graham Coxon.Released on his 84th birthday, Transform Me Then Into A Fish is a recreation of his 1965 debut album, the songs reappraised through a lens of age and experience.Carthy’s voice is careworn but it’s never less than compelling. Over the years, the musician’s delivery has become more conversational – lending a fresh pathos to Lovely Joan, the story of a maid who tricks a naïve suitor into handing over his jewellery, then steals his horse.He goes one further on The Famous Flower of Serving Men, delivering all 32 verses of the 17th Century revenge ballad in spoken word, laying stark the brutal violence at its core.Carthy is the third member of his family to receive a Mercury nomination, after daughter Eliza and his late wife, Norma Waterson. Eliza joins him on Ye Mariners All, and adds a sitar line to a mystical version of Scarborough Fair.When he first excavated and recorded these songs six decades ago, they were forgotten relics. Now, they are part of the folk cannon – but, as he closes the circle of his long career, Carthy shows how adaptable they (and he) remain.Pa Salieu – Afrikan AlienWarner RecordsPa Salieu was tipped as the UK’s next rap star thanks to crossover hits like Frontline and his Send Them Back To Coventry mixtape. But in 2022, his rise came to an abrupt halt by a 33-month prison sentence for his participation in a 2018 nightclub brawl.Afrikan Alien is his first mixtape since being released, and it showcased a newly philosophical angle to his lyrics – reflecting on his incarceration, his Gambian family, and what it means to be of African heritage in the UK.On the title track, he gets angry at a “hostile” environment where “melanin [is] kryptonite”. But he also shares his hard-won wisdom: “Eradicate any kind of energy that pins you down… Accumulate all that you need and help the people eat.”Reflecting his heritage, the music is full of Afrobeat rhythms, log drums, spiritual mantras and lilting guitar lines.Best of all is Allergy – whose flitting percussion adds a casual swagger to Salieu’s story of becoming “allergic to the bad vibes” after turning to scripture.Whizzing past in just 27 minutes, it’s nonetheless a signpost that Pa Salieu is back on track.PinkPantheress – Fancy ThatWarner RecordsIn a Reddit Q&A, PinkPantheress said Fancy That represents a “more fun” side to her personality than the introspective, “emo asf” lyrics of her debut album Heaven Knows.She certainly seems to be having a blast on party-centric club cuts like Romeo and Tonight, while Illegal can stake a claim to being song of the summer after its opening lyrics – “My name is Pink and it’s really nice to meet you” – inspired more than 39 million TikToks.Musically, it’s a breathless, colourful sprint through a night out, full of conversational asides and budding romance.For the soundtrack, the 24-year-old looks back to the music of her youth for the soundtrack, liberally sampling hits by Underworld, Basement Jaxx and Just Jack – without surrendering her own bubbly brew of capsule pop.It’s all over in about 20 minutes – but what a rush.Pulp – MoreRough Trade RecordsWhen Pulp reunited in 2022 nobody, least of all the band, was expecting new music. But during their North American dates, the Sheffield band unexpectedly debuted a new song called Spike Island.”Nobody threw things at us, or left to go to the bar,” Jarvis Cocker told BBC 6 Music, “so we just thought we’d carry on and see what we could conjure up.”The result is More – Pulp’s first album since 2001’s We Love Life – which somehow managed to sound like an album they’d recorded and forgotten in their 1990s heyday.The lyrics are the only giveaway that this is the work of a band in their late middle age – as Cocker, the poet laureate of suburban misfits, sings movingly about stagnation, divorce and mortality.On shimmering disco anthem Got To Have Love, he warns against squandering relationships: “When love disappears / Life disappears / and you sit on your backside / for 25 years.” Later, on the pensive Slow Jam, he stares old age in the face and wonders how “you’ve gone from all you that could be to all that you once were”.If that sounds heavy, don’t worry. Pulp haven’t lost their ability to wrap scathing lyrics in beautiful melodies and shuffling indie-pop grooves. It’s a More than welcome return.Sam Fender – People WatchingPolydor RecordsSam Fender’s an unusual proposition. He’s a festival headliner with punch-the-sky choruses whose lyrics are overtly political.On this, his third album, he picks at the scabs of northern working-class life, and rails against a system that leaves families mired in bureaucratic neglect.Death and loss loom large. The title track was inspired by visiting his mentor and “surrogate mother” Annie Orwin in a palliative care home – and he paints a bleak picture of a “faciilty fallin’ to bits / understaffed and overruled by callous hands”.The wistful Crumbling Empire draws parallels between the post-industrial decline of Detroit and Fender’s hometown of North Shields, while Rein Me In finds him struggling to shake the ghosts of a failed relationship.Fender said his ambition for People Watching was to write “11 songs about ordinary people”, but this vexed, anxious album ends up being something more substantial – a tribute to human spirit in a time of deprivation and indifference.Wolf Alice – The ClearingSony MusicWolf Alice’s fourth album has been their most polarising to date.Working with US producer Greg Kurstin and adopting a polished soft rock sheen, the band have received 10/10 reviews from the NME and DIY Magazine (“their boldest, most striking record yet”) but scathing critiques from rock publications like Uncut and The Quietus, which dismissed it as “less edgy than Sheryl Crow”.It was definitely a head-spinner for fans expecting the band to stick to their blend of 90s indie, shoegaze and dream pop.Take lead single Bloom Baby Bloom. It’s an anarchic song, full of two-bar guitar solos and ostentatious drum fills. Disorientating on first listen, the aural chaos serves a purpose, as singer Ellie Rowsell confronts misogyny and self-doubt in the verses before rising above the noise for a bucolic chorus.Other songs are more straightforward – Just Two Girls is a warm and nostalgic reflection on friendship, and Passenger Seat is all pillowy melancholy as Rowsell recalls a road trip with an ex.Like that song, The Clearing’s cirriform melodies are best experienced on a coastal drive with the windows down and the wind blowing through your hair. Ultimately, the band’s fourth consecutive Mercury nomination is well deserved.
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Pulp, CMAT and Wolf Alice among nominees
