Laura Mvula – The Dreaming Room
The best moments of Laura Mvula’s 2013 debut Sing to the Moon seemed to suggest the arrival of a unique talent – certainly more so than its advance billing as a Radio 2-friendly retro soul album. But its follow-up really bears that promise out. There hasn’t been another album released in the last 12 months that’s even remotely like The Dreaming Room: it exists in a world entirely of its own. The album’s serpentine tunes thread their way through 36 minutes of strange, heady musical juxtapositions: explosive vocal harmonies, baroque classical ornamentation, off-centre funk, leftfield hip-hop, psychedelic R&B. The music is richly, seductively melodic without really using choruses or hooks; the songs seem to slowly unfurl before you; the lyrics – and Mvula’s delivery of them – are both poignant and painful. It sounds like pop music floating free from the standard rules of pop music, heading into uncharted territory. Alexis Petridis
Anonhi – Hopelessness
If PJ Harvey can scoop an award twice, including one for her baroque protest album Let England Shake, then there’s room for another second-time winner and for another album that takes aim at the world. Anonhi’s Hopelessness eviscerates with bittersweet sharpness, constituting surely the most ambitious songs of 2016’s shortlist – tackling war, climate change, murky politics and violence. They have an emotional range that spans lacerating anger and heart-clutching despair, underpinned by futuristic and expansive soundscapes from producers Hudson Mohawke and Oneohtrix Point Never. The opening track, Drone Bomb Me – a longing ballad from the perspective of a civilian beckoning a fatal drone strike – cuts deep. Climate change banger (a new musical genre?) 4 Degrees is another engulfing listen that sounds as if it is swooping over epic landscapes, with Anonhi’s stark falsetto contrasting perfectly with Mohawke’s signature majestic horns. Hopelessness is the only strictly electronic album this year but it’s also the only album brave enough to take on the bigger picture. That’s something to be hopeful for. Kate Hutchinson
David Bowie – Blackstar
If the Mercury prize is supposed to recognise albums that capture a moment or prove somehow ahead of the game, it’s no wonder Blackstar is the runaway favourite with bookmakers. Bowie’s best album in more than three decades freefalls through the music that inspired him across his career – from glam to jazz to Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly – and emerges as something genuinely strange, off-kilter, otherworldly and postmodern. The lyrics wrongfooted everyone until two days after the album’s release, when Bowie died and it became clear that he had tdrawn on his incurable cancer and impending death in his final work of art. Blackstar is effectively a loving goodbye to the world, and songs such as Lazarus (“Look at me, I’m in heaven”) and the sublime Dollar Days offer insights into illness, mortality and afterlife that were designed to be listened to once the reasons for their offering had been made clear. What a way to go. Dave Simpson
Skepta – Konnichiwa
There are two grime records on this year’s Mercury shortlist: Kano’s Made in the Manor, which speaks to the genre’s garage genes, and Skepta’s Konnichiwa, an album that embodies its zeitgeisty present. Over the past two years, the north London rapper has managed to contribute to British culture in a way that feels truly contemporary – and made the forecast of an exclusively retromania-fuelled pop future seem just like a bad dream in the process. The real basis for that achievement is an aesthetic one. Skepta is funny, clever and spirited on Konnichiwa, but more importantly he’s stylish – something evidenced by everything from his minimal, slightly vicious production to the talk of binning his naff designer clobber. This is not a case of style over substance: these days, style is substance. Now more than ever, music is a multi-channel enterprise, and as Drake and Kanye West have made clear, your aesthetic aura is an important facet of your latest release. That means Konnichiwa isn’t just the most arresting album on the shortlist – it’s also the most relevant, by a very long way. Rachel Aroesti
The 1975 – I Like It When You Sleep, For You Are So Beautiful Yet So Unaware of It
Rock history is replete with second albums that dwell on the disaffection and disillusion that comes with being made prosperous, famous and adored. And most of those albums tend to be intensely dislikeable affairs, because those of us who are not prosperous, famous and adored tend to find it hard to see the downside to that situation. The 1975’s second album could easily have fallen into that trap, but didn’t, because singer Matty Healy portrayed himself not as the person alienated by everyone else’s shallowness, but just as shallow as everyone else, which gave the album a sense of humour: it’s a crisis caused by self-knowledge rather than self-importance. On the bleakly beautiful, none-more-80s ballad A Change of Heart, he paints himself as part of a couple equally incapable of empathy: it’s Less Than Zero set to music, with the year’s best couplet: “You said I’m full of diseases, your eyes were full of regret / And then you took a picture of your salad and you put it on the internet.” Healy’s isn’t a world of inchoate rage on the estates, but one you recognise from the teenagers you talk to: confused autodidacts trying to trace a pattern in the world (and, boy, can he write a lyric, with the band supplying tunes to match). If you want an album that captures the magpie nature of modern music – skipping between styles, borrowing from the Police, Yazoo, M83, nu soul, pop house, Bowie and scores more with alacrity – then this is the one that sounds like playlist culture brought to life. Michael Hann
Radiohead – A Moon Shaped Pool
Radiohead have now clocked up five Mercury nominations, more than any other artist. They also, rather famously, have failed to win the award in any of their previous four appearances on the shortlist, making them the Leonardo DiCaprio of credible guitar music. In fairness, you can make at least a semi-credible case for three of those losses: OK Computer was defeated by Roni Size/Reprazent, crowning drum and bass’s ascendancy at the time; Amnesiac lost out to PJ Harvey’s sumptuous Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea (Thom Yorke’s appearance on that album acting as a consolation prize of sorts); and Hail to the Thief came up against the might of Dizzee Rascal’s Boy in Da Corner. All fair enough, but then in 2008 In Rainbows lost to Elbow’s milquetoast The Seldom Seen Kid, and suddenly their failure to win the award started to look like a bit of a slight. Now is a decent time for the Mercurys to correct that. A Moon Shaped Pool is Radiohead’s best album in more than a decade. It’s a dizzying blend of past and present, of organic textures and glitchy futurism. It’s polemical, elegiac, beautiful and frequently furious. You can hum along to at least seven of the tracks on it, rather than the usual none. It has True Love bloody Waits on it. In short, it’s the sound of a band at the peak of their powers. It would be a worthy winner. Gwilym Mumford
