Organisers of the Mercury Prize have just announced that this year’s awards ceremony will take place on September 9th at London’s Eventim Apollo. The prestigious annual music prize was first awarded in 1992, and thus the 2021 ceremony will be the event’s 30th installation.
It has also been announced that the 12-album shortlist for the prize is set to be revealed on July 22nd. Last year, Michael Kiwanuka’s expansive masterpiece ‘KIWANUKA’ took home the award, beating off eleven other strong contenders, including Dua Lipa’s ‘Future Nostalgia’, Charli XCX’s ‘How I’m Feeling Now’, and Kano’s ‘Hoodies All Summer’.
Awarded for the best album released by a British or Irish act that year, the Mercury Prize has the ability to propel any artist or group’s career. If there was ever any need to back up this claim with tangible evidence, the Official Charts Company revealed that the sales of ‘KIWANUKA’ soared 4,537% after the singer-songwriter’s win in 2020. This surge also sent the album to number four on the Official Album Chart, not far off its number two debut, nearly a year after its release.
The award has an eclectic history of winners across a variety of different contemporary genres. They range from Dizzee Rascal’s genre-defining grime debut ‘Boy In Da Corner’ in 2003, to Arctic Monkey’s indie rock classic ‘Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I Am Not’ in 2006, to Sampha’s neo-soul opus ‘Process’ in 2017. Many of the albums that have won a Mercury Prize have cemented themselves in the British musical canon, something that is surely not a coincidence.
In a digital age of online streaming platforms, the award serves as a testament to the album format. After Dave’s ‘Psychodrama’ took home the prize in 2019, Geoff Taylor, Chief Executive of the BPI and Mercury Prize, spoke about the continued importance of albums within music. He told Music Week, “We’re very passionate about the album as a format. People have been writing for some years about the disaggregation of the album and playlists, and [suggesting] that the album would become less important. But from the artist side, you see how important the album is as a means of self-expression.”
The 2021 ceremony will hopefully take place in a world free of COVID-induced social restrictions. It will provide people throughout the UK and Ireland with a chance to celebrate music, which, as BPI data on the UK’s listening habits over lockdown recently demonstrated, has been essential to helping the population get through a tough year of social isolation.
