Mercury Prize 2024: A nominee list that epitomises modern music
The nominee list for the Mercury Prize 2024 has been announced. While the murmurings about near misses and lucky nods are a perennial inevitability every year – some of the criticised omissions perhaps fair when it comes to the likes of Nadine Shah and Bill Ryder-Jones, and some superior avant-garde LPs being snubbed – what this year’s list irrefutably nails is an accurate representation of modern music’s broadening sphere.
While the award has often been hailed as the most broadly representative in Britain, if you trudge back through the nominees to 1994, you’ll find four Britpop releases among the ten given the nod and more than a few jungle-adjacent LPs in the mix that year too. However, that limited assortment quite accurately captures the listening habits of the era.
What is interesting this time out is that the 12 releases nominated could be argued to be 12 very disparate genres. The artists – Barry Can’t Swim, BERWYN, Beth Gibbons, Cat Burns, Charli xcx, CMAT, Corinne Bailey Rae, corto.alto, English Teacher, Ghetts, Nia Archives, and The Last Dinner Party – are all individualistic presences in modern British music without much of a notable tie between them.
This evidences the fact that homogenous genres and scenes are now becoming dissolute. In 2006, the year Arctic Monkeys’ debut triumphed, indie dominated the list, just as it dominated alternative music at the time. Now, that seems to be a thing of the past. Back then, you were more confined to what was being played in your local indie club, printed in the mainstream media, and rolled out on MTV. The internet and its many avenues have now expanded the horizons for young musicians and the array of niches they are now quickly exposed to.
Owing to this, we are not only seeing genre steadily dissolve within music – Far Out garnered English Teacher with a five-star review back in April for This Could Be Texas and hailed their entrancing, indefinable blend of baroque pop, punk, sci-fi soundscapes and gentle lounge – but also no set scenes or distinctions divide music fandom up into tribalism. Culture is as much of a smorgasbord of fusion delights, and the folks over at Mercury have captured that in their refreshingly female-dominated line-up.
The dissolution of genre in music?
In a strange way, eclecticism has become a defining trait of modern music development. In a world where culture is a constant water spigot blasting us with viral pop songs on TikTok, pranks exposing Taylor Swift fans to the avant-post-punk of Cabaret Voltaire, gentle jazz playlists soundtracking the silence of working from home or studying, and GarageBand meaning the next star can emerge overnight without leaving their bedroom — perhaps it only natural that music is moving in strange ways and the days of a dominant scene are as alien as everyone drinking £2 pints and having only five TV channels to choose from.
As Mercury’s noble nods suggest, this fragmentation, in every sense, is something to celebrate. It also perhaps hints at why some of the brilliant but more conventional releases have been omitted in favour of a list that we will surely look back on in time to come and celebrate as, at the very least, accurate — even if some of the records will no doubt prove forgettable or cheaper than their current market price implies.
As ITOKA founder, Yihao Chen, recently told Far Out, technology has “democratised“ the whole music making process. “So that everybody in the world who is excited about music creation can have the same access as professional musicians to express themselves.” When that same technology has exposed the musician to a wider spread of potential influences than ever before, music has shifted. Our tastes have accordingly expanded too.
The wider effect of this can be seen in culture’s interplay with society. The class of 2024 nominees reflect a world where identity is fluid and multifaceted. That goes right down to our music tastes and the inspirations of those moulding it. Hell, even cancel culture may have put an end to our reverence of the past and the revivalism that followed, because none of the records really have a notable counterpart from the past. So, it mightn’t be a list of masterpieces, but at least it’s refreshing.
