The Mercury Awards 2021: The Best of British Music, but Who Wins?

The Hyundai Mercury Prize ‘Album of the Year’ is a competition that has been running since 1992, designed to celebrate and promote the best of British and Irish music, recognising artistic achievement across a range of contemporary genres. The Mercury Award is essentially the equivalent to the Booker Prize for literature, and the Turner prize for art, with the main objectives of the prize being to recognize and celebrate artistic achievement, providing a snapshot of the year in music and to help introduce new albums from a range of music genres to a wider audience. Previous notable winners consist of Primal Scream, Dizzee Rascal, Arctic Monkeys, The xx, Wolf Alice, Dave, and many, many others.

It feels as though when the time comes to decide on the nominees for the year’s awards, the whole of the musical community comes together, and anyone who is anyone within the industry gets their say on who should be nominated. The shortlist is often chosen by an independent judging panel and revealed at a launch event, hosted by BBC Music’s Huw Stephens.

Judges of the competition explain: “It is a testament to the strength of British music that, during a year which saw musicians face the toughest challenges of their lives, so many remarkable albums came out nonetheless. There was an embarrassment of riches for this…