A third of the way through her Hyundai Mercury-shortlisted debut Lost & Found, neo-soul artist Jorja Smith lays out a plain-spoken statement that sums up her album’s stormy emotional terrain. “I’ve been lost, I’ve been lost again — and I’ve been found,” she says, speaking with the lilting accent of her hometown, Walsall. She concludes: “I’m constantly finding myself.” Smith embraces the flux of 20-something emotions and centres them at the core of her music. By the end of listening to the album, it feels as if you’ve photocopied her brain.
Smith’s raw-knuckled intimacy is characteristic of a number of this year’s Hyundai Mercury Prize shortlisted artists. Listening to Florence + The Machine’s album High as Hope feels like witnessing open-heart surgery, as she weaves her most painfully personal songs to date into a sonic tapestry that also packs an arena-sized punch. She describes the title as a way of linking those threads and reflecting her positive point of view.
The dissonant, strung-out The Ooz by King Krule (AKA Archy Marshall) takes you down a haunted-feeling mineshaft to the dark recesses of his mind. Its 19 tracks don’t balk at depicting the gnarlier side of life. “It’s all about the gunk,” Marshall has said of the album.
There’s a powerful lineage of prize-supported albums that have invited listeners to see the world through an artist’s eyes. Appropriately for an award that spotlights British talent, prizewinners have often used their records to deliver their own equivalent of a “state of the nation” address.
Dizzee Rascal’s epoch-defining Boy in Da Corner, which won the prize in 2003, was a sharp-edged depiction of young black identity in the UK. Fifteen tracks allowed for a multi-faceted exploration of that life, from the nimble, socially conscious Brand New Day, to the playboy braggadocio of I Luv U.
Meanwhile the 1996 winner, Pulp’s Different Class, shone a light on the complexities of class relations from varying angles but with consistent wit. Famously, there’s the wealthy and sheltered St Martin’s art student who wants to “live like common people”, but frontman Jarvis Cocker’s most biting lines on the record are found in I Spy, when bluntly describing working-class life: “I was dragged up / My favorite parks are car parks / Grass is something you smoke / Birds are something you shag.”
Many of today’s biggest artists are doubling down on the album format, recognising its unique potential to create a cohesive body of work – and taking measures to make sure that it’s listened to in its intended form. Beyoncé’s career-realigning self-titled visual album was released in late 2015 on iTunes as a complete suite of music, resulting in her best-selling album since 2006’s B’Day. Frank Ocean’s Blonde mirrored this model, dropping without warning (with a coffee table zine in tow). And you could also see the “Beyoncé effect” in this summer’s Kanye West-produced album series: five seven-track releases that appeared on streaming services fully formed, without lead singles.
That’s a strategy also adopted by Arctic Monkeys with their Hyundai Mercury-shortlisted 2018 album Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino. The fantastically esoteric lounge-pop record, centred around a fictional luxury hotel on the moon, was released this May without any preceding indications of its sound (a quixotic video for Four Out of Five arrived a few days later). Like David Bowie’s similarly cosmically minded The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, its interplanetary visions are best experienced as a whole.
But shortlisted albums haven’t always needed to be space-themed to transport listeners. On Portishead’s 1995 winner, Dummy, the sound of Beth Gibbons’ spine-tingling singing voice can transport you into other atmospheres; on Antony and the Johnsons’ 2005 winner I Am a Bird Now, Anohni’s voice resonates with haunting, celestial effect. Meanwhile, Bat for Lashes’ 2007-shortlisted Fur and Gold conjures a quasi-mystical escape from earthly pressures, and Radiohead’s 2008-shortlisted In Rainbows has Nasa-inspired artwork and is centred around the concept of transience.
The album’s capacity for storytelling comes to the fore on PJ Harvey’s Let England Shake, which in 2011 made her the only artist to scoop the prize twice (she also won in 2001 for the freewheeling Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea). A new direction for Harvey at the time, Let England Shake is a subtle yet searing indictment of war, with polemical lyrics paired with some of the most enchanting music she’s created.
The 12 tracks allow her to consider the effects of violence from discrete angles. On the visceral The Words That Maketh Murder, she talks of the horrors of battle, singing of soldiers’ bodies like “lumps of meat” and swarming with flies. Yet elsewhere, Harvey extends her empathy to the families left behind. “Their young wives with white hands wave goodbye,” she sings with anguish. “Their arms as bitter branches spreading into the world.”
Hyundai Mercury-recognised artists can offer alternative ways of seeing our flawed world, too. London jazz outfit Sons of Kemet’s album Your Queen Is a Reptile, on the shortlist for the 2018 Hyundai Mercury Prize, looks far beyond Buckingham Palace to offer subjective suggestions for women who deserve to be considered royalty: song titles include My Queen Is Harriet Tubman, in reference to the woman who led many slaves to freedom, and My Queen Is Angela Davis, inspired by the US academic and political activist. In an interview with Clash, frontman Shabaka Hutchings explains: “I’m trying to provoke my listeners to consider who their queen is and the role of myth in the fact of us even having a queen.”
Today, albums only account for 22% of a streaming user’s listening time, according to one US study. But the format is far from fading, even as the world’s music consumption habits evolve. Many of us grew up at a time when the album was king, and it remains unrivalled to this day thanks to its potential for colourful, personal storytelling. That’s something that no playlist can provide.
