Nominated by Dale Maplethorpe

How do you even begin to describe a band like The New Eves? It’s 2025, music has been knocking about for thousands of years, every sound, chord and vocal inflexion imaginable will have been uttered at some point, and yet, music still finds a way to surprise us. This year, that surprise comes in the form of The New Eves and their spectacular record, The New Eve Is Rising.

A mixture of poetry, folk and punk all come together for one of the most endearing and eye-opening listens in recent years. Every sentence is beautiful and deserves to be thoroughly analysed, every second of music is carefully constructed and worth breaking the silence for. This is an album to truly obsess over. As we dive deeper into a musical landscape where lyrical vomit feels like a default setting, it’s good to have an album that sets the bar and shows us what poetry within sound should be like.

Pulp – ‘More’

Nominated by Ben Forrest

Think back over the past year in music; the presence of Pulp has been utterly inescapable. From their extensive arena tour to that incredible not-so-secret set at Glastonbury, Jarvis Cocker’s outfit have been everywhere, but not without good reason. A band of lesser ambition might have resigned themselves to a cash-grab reunion tour or a greatest hits release, but Pulp came back swinging with More, an album that adds entirely new layers to the enduring repertoire of the Sheffield outfit.

Rather than relying on nostalgia points or harking back to their Britpop heyday, More is an incredibly ambitious, well-crafted record which perfectly captures the unifying appeal that Pulp have always managed to maintain. What’s more, the band are no strangers to the Mercury nominations, with Different Class taking the crown back in 1996, so it’s not impossible to imagine them extending their legacy with another win in 2025.

Nubya Garcia – ‘Odyssey’

Nominated by Ben Forrest

Thus far, jazz has never been the first port of call when it comes to handing out Mercury Prizes. In fact, the only jazz-adjacent act to ever take home the crown was Ezra Collective back in 2023. Nevertheless, the rich sonic tapestry created by London’s premier saxophonist, Nubya Garcia, on Odyssey should put her firmly in the running. 

A lush, fantastically diverse offering, as we have come to expect from Garcia, the album firmly cements the bandleader among Britain’s most inventive and exciting jazz artists. What’s more, it manages to pull off the near-impossible task of topping her previous record, the Mercury-nominated Source from 2020. So, perhaps this is the year that jazz returns to the heights of Mercury success, and there is no better artist to do so than Garcia.

Katy J Pearson – ‘Someday, Now’

Nominated by Calum MacHattie

I now understand how Leonardo DiCaprio fans felt during the Oscars. A mere Mercury Prize nomination for Katy J Pearson is well overdue, having crafted two mighty fine albums before this, and if I don’t see one this year, I may riot. Her songwriting is always original and heartfelt, delicately blending genres from rock, folk and Americana with frightening ease. But on Someday, Now she managed to hit full stride, building an album that extends beyond the intimacy of her guitar and allowing her stunning voice to endlessly soar on top of beautifully crafted arrangements.

Take lead single ‘Maybe’ for example. The vocal take on this is truly mesmerising, floating up and down several keys in a way multiple artists would envy, while remaining faithful to a catchy yet curious melody. It’s a statement for how the entire album unfolds: thoughtful, innovative and groovy in a way she hadn’t quite reached before. I’ve said multiple times that Katy J is operating solely in her own lane, in competition with no one in contemporary music, and this album is a definitive representation of that.

Wolf Alice – ‘The Clearing’

Nominated by Lauren Hunter

I mean this with my chest when I say that Wolf Alice is the best rock band around right now. They weren’t always this way – I loved them, but they previously had a certain wispy superfluousness that risked them eventually floating away out of the ether of relevance. Now, The Clearing displays emphatically not only that they’re here to stay, but that they’ve made such an imprint on the scene that deserves the Mercury’s recognition. 

From the thrilling, cinematic opening of ‘The Thorns’, to the perfect elixir of feminine flirtatiousness of ‘Just Two Girls’, and the raucous scream of classic rock in ‘Bread Butter Tea Sugar’, the band have offered up a smorgasbord of an album with a whole range of delectable delights. It’s testimony to an indulgent, brazen confidence that Wolf Alice are putting their best foot forward – and the Mercury would be the ideal addition to that feast.

Sam Fender – ‘People Watching’

Nominated by Lauren Hunter

Before I start hearing shouts of “Fix!” through the screen at the perfect poeticism of the Geordie king receiving the highest honour of his career conveniently in his home town, Sam Fender should still be very much one on the Mercury’s radar this year despite its Newcastle setting. He has always had a penchant for searing lyricism, but he took this to whole new heights on his most recent album, People Watching.

In what has been a difficult 2025 for Fender since the album’s release, blighted by vocal problems and cancelled gigs, the Mercury would surely be a silver lining. But this equally isn’t a sympathy vote – it’s about the crushing devastation he cultivated on ‘Remember My Name’, the working-class home truths on ‘Crumbling Empire’, and the invigorating rock-infused crowd-pleaser ‘People Watching’. Fender is a testament to real resilience and lyrical grit. The Mercury would propel him to different heights.

The Cure – ‘Songs of a Lost World’

Nominated by Kelly Scanlan

When Robert Smith joined Olivia Rodrigo on stage at this year’s Glastonbury festival, it became clear there’s no space he’s not welcome in. But that’s not why he’s the most deserving of victory at this year’s Mercury Prize. What’s so great about Songs of a Lost World – and something it has over everything else probably slated for similar wins – is that no matter the expanse of The Cure’s past, the songs feel entirely new, as though The Cure exists here and now, as well as everywhere and nowhere.

Beyond that, though, is the fact that the record also feels like everything we need in today’s broken world. Much like the perturbed defeat of the title itself, this is the soundtrack to the malaise in all of us, but also the angsty need to express, to feel, when everywhere we look, there’s numbness, across miles and miles of political and societal crap. The music is for that limbo where it feels like both the beginning and the end, all swirling around in a gorgeous concoction of intense musical brilliance.

FKA Twigs – ‘EUSEXA’

Nominated by Rachael Pimblett

FKA Twigs made us wait five years for EUSEXUA. The experimental techno-dance record is mercurial, transcendental, and overwhelmingly sensual. The club scene, yanked into the spotlight in Charli XCX’s previously Mercury-nominated Brat is underlined, bloated with endless new meanings, and becomes the scene of both ego-death and renewed self-discovery. Twigs’ party contains life and death, twittering across a starry sonic landscape both gentle and harsh.

In ‘Gir Feels Good’, Twigs’ Massive Attack-esque style electronics centre female pleasure deliciously, while ‘Perfect Stranger’ is club-ready in aching simplicity. In ‘Childlike Things’, we have an unexpected feature from 11-year-old North West singing in Japanese. On this record, Twigs’ work is the definition of tantalising and elusive, inviting us into a world wrapped in flair and illuminated with the promise of no return.

Nilüfer Yanya – ‘My Method Actor’

Nominated by Rachael Pimblett

Listening to Nilüfer Yanya is like listening to a storm. Lightning zips in her confessional lyricism, while around her an intricately woven, grumbling indie soundtrack twirls like thunder. At times it rains, like on ‘Binding’, where Yanya captures all the wearying resolve of fighting against a dreary romance with slow, reflective intention. Sometimes the storm is dry and mean, like on ‘Call it Love’ as she hazily recounts “my body’s certain / call from a distant wide-open zone”. Sometimes, it’s the perfect rage to dance along to, such as summer soundtrack beat ‘Like I Say (I runaway).” 

Yanya has previously said that she doesn’t make music for this kind of mainstream success: “I’ve always known I’m not going to be that kind of artist. I don’t have the capacity or desire to do that.” Her music, so separate and enchanting, deserves the prize for exactly that reason. It’s music not for the masses, but for herself.  Listen to the dry drum-beat contend with the soaring strings in ‘Mutations’, and tell me this isn’t artistic achievement. Yanya’s textures are flirtatious and foreboding, opening the door to greater, more adventurous gene-experimentation.

Bdrmm – ‘Microtonic’

Nominated by Aimee Ferrier

2024 saw Yorkshire-based English Teacher win the Mercury Prize, which is a testament to the incredible music scene that is currently thriving in God’s own county. This year, I nominate Hull-based bdrmm as the competition’s Yorkshire-based representatives, following the release of their stunning third album, Microtonic, back in February. The band’s roots are in shoegaze, but with each release they’ve significantly expanded their musical palette, and Microtonic is their most ambient and electronic yet.

The record blends the dreaminess that has always marked their sound with whirring synths, glitching beats, and evocative soundscapes, pulling you into a late-night dancefloor state of mind. There’s an air of mystery and darkness at times, especially on standout ‘Lake Disappointment’, while the experimental beats of opener ‘goit’ are accompanied by ominous musings on mortality, courtesy of Working Men’s Club singer Sydney Minsky-Sargeant. 

Microntonic is an accomplished release from the band, who are certainly deserving of Mercury recognition for their defiant approach to experimentation, which sees them ever-evolving with a refusal to conform to musical trends.

Divorce – ‘Drive to Goldenhammer’

Nominated by Reuben Cross

If, like me, you’re a fan of going to see bands in 100-capacity venues, it’s often quite fun to play a little game with yourself to predict which of these fledgling bands genuinely has a shot at being the next big act. You may well have been lucky enough to catch last year’s Mercury winners English Teacher as early as 2020 in a socially-distanced environment and picked up on their future potential, and for anyone who saw Nottingham foursome Divorce at their early shows in 2021 and 2022, you’d have been able to witness a fully-formed band who seemed to possess the nous to become one of the UK’s hottest prospects.

On their debut album, Drive to Goldenhammer, Divorce formally announced themselves as the complete package, with their irresistible alt-country hooks and interweaving dual harmony vocals. Frontpersons Tiger Cohen-Towell and Felix Mackenzie-Barrow have an undeniable chemistry on record that they’ve been honing together since their days as short-lived duo Megatrain, but the maturity that they’ve gone through since then can be heard in how developed, earnest and crushing their lyrics have become in the new project. If there’s any ‘new’ band on the circuit who deserves the nod, then Divorce have made several strong claims for the position.

Ezra Collective – ‘Dance, No One’s Watching’

Nominated by Reuben Cross

The Mercury Prize has a certain fondness for re-nominating past winners, and while former recipients rarely stand a chance of repeating their victories (unless you’re PJ Harvey), Ezra Collective still feel like a safe and fully deserving bet when it comes to announcing the shortlist. Given that they were the band who finally broke the mould and became the first jazz act to win the award in 2023 for their second album, Where I’m Meant To Be, it would almost feel amiss not to nominate them for a follow-up record that takes all of its predecessor’s strengths and ramps them up to the next level.

The quintet, led by rhythm section brothers Femi and TJ Koleoso, have become the poster children for the UK’s thriving jazz scene over the last decade. With their most urgent and celebratory record, Dance, No One’s Watching, they’ve proven exactly why they’re not just a hit within their niche, but expand far beyond the parameters of the genre sphere they operate within. Jazz, to many people, has always been seen as a closed-off and elitist genre that looks down upon other scenes with contempt, but for Ezra Collective, they’re putting in the hard graft to convince everyone that it’s the most unifying music that one can create, and that’s helped them produce their best effort to date.