Sam Fender has been crowned the winner of the 2025 Mercury Prize for his third studio album, People Watching.
The singer-songwriter won the prestigious music award just a stone’s throw from where he was raised, in North Shields, as the ceremony took place at Newcastle’s Utilita Arena for the first time.
He beat shortlisted artists including rock bands Fontaines DC and Wolf Alice, Irish pop star CMAT, and Britpop icons Pulp.
Announcing the win, judging panel member and Radio 1 presenter Sian Eleri said she and her fellow judges had loved People Watching’s “character and ambition”.
"After much hard discussion we decided on one album that stood out for its cohesion, character and ambition,” she said. “It felt like a classic album, one that will take pride of place in record collections for years to come.”
Accepting the trophy, Fender led the live audience in a chant of “Toon, Toon”, before praising CMAT and Fontaines DC, then fetched his guitar for a reprise of the title track “People Watching”.
Fender, whose career has skyrocketed since he broke through with his 2019 debut Hypersonic Missiles, recently completed a huge run of shows that included three nights at the 52,000-capacity St James’ Park in Newcastle. He was previously shortlisted for the Mercury Prize in 2022 for his second album, Seventeen Going Under.
Upon its release in February, People Watching topped the charts and sold 107,000 copies in its first week, the biggest chart debut for a British artist since Harry Styles’s album Harry’s House came out in 2022.
Fender was the last artist to perform during the ceremony, receiving a deafening roar from the live audience as he appeared onstage for a rendition of “People Watching”.
“I think, judging by that reaction, he might just be playing to a home crowd,” host Lauren Laverne said.
Many of this year’s shortlisted artists praised the decision to move the ceremony away from its usual location in London while appearing on the red carpet earlier in the evening.
Folk musician Martin Carthy, who at 84 is the award’s oldest ever nominee, told the BBC that holding it up north was a “master stroke” and that he felt honoured to be there, despite being a “bloomin’ southerner”.
Echoing the sentiment, fellow nominee Emma Jean Thackray suggested that people were “starting to realise that the music industry is not just about London”.
She added: “It’s amazing that different places are getting some shine and I’m particularly happy that the Mercury Prize this year is in the north, being a Northern girl.”
Also shortlisted this year was Scottish singer-songwriter Jacob Alon, recognised for their debut album In Limerence, which explores themes of sexuality, romantic obsession and loneliness in the queer community.
Instead of the usual “token jazz album”, two jazz records appeared on this year’s shortlist. The first spot went to Welsh pianist Joe Webb, for his technically impressive, well-humoured album Hamstrings and Hurricanes, while the second nod went to musical polymath Thackray, whose 2025 record Weirdo melds jazz with rock, funk and hip-hop influences.
CMAT was widely viewed as the favourite to win; however, the Mercury Prize judges are seen as notorious for not selecting the popular favourite.
This was CMAT’s second Mercury Prize nomination – she was also shortlisted for her second album, Crazymad, for Me, which was released in 2023.
Her 2025 shortlisted album Euro-Country, meanwhile, topped the charts in her native Ireland and also made the No 2 spot in the UK.
Appearing on the red carpet earlier that evening, the musician born Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson, 29, told the PA news agency that Ireland’s current surge of musical success comes from “a generation of traumatised people” and was the result of “a lot of bad fruits coming to harvest”.
“I wish I could pinpoint it to anything else, but it’s just the fact that everything is coming up through the rafters so quickly, and there’s a lot of artists from a very small, not very densely populated country, making a lot of music that fleets quite important, as opposed to trivial,” she said.
“I think everybody is a bit earnest and has had their head screwed on a little bit because we all went through something 20-odd years ago, my age group, and we’re now really dealing with the fall-out and the repercussions of it.”
CMAT references the 2008 Irish economic downturn on Euro-Country, including in the title track, where she sings: “All the big boys/ All the Berties/ All the envelopes, yeah they hurt me/ I was 12 when the das started killing themselves all around me.”
The shortlist is curated by an independent judging panel of music industry professionals, among them Eleri, jazz musician Jamie Cullum, The Times’s chief pop and rock critic Will Hodgkinson and BBC Radio 6 presenter Jamz Supernova.
Last year’s prize went to the Leeds-formed band English Teacher for their debut album, This Could Be Texas.
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