The most striking thing about this year’s Mercury shortlist might be how few household names it contains. For some – aghast that English Heretic have been overlooked and that there’s no nod for the punishing avant-punk of Fuck Off by Good Throb – any Mercury shortlist will always be woefully mainstream. Yet this is clearly not a selection of albums compiled by people overly concerned about one august rock critic’s damning assessment of the 2014 winner, the eponymous debut by Young Fathers, as “an obscure Scottish hop hop [sic] mash up that nobody bought”.
The sales gulf between the first and second most commercially successful albums on the list is striking: Florence + the Machine’s How Big How Blue How Beautiful went to No 1 in eight countries and sold more than 200,000 copies in the UK and US its first week, while its closest rival, Jamie xx’s In Colour, had a combined UK and US first-week sale of less than 40,000. The 2015 Mercury shortlist tends far more to the critically acclaimed than the big selling: eclectic Zimbabwe-born singer-songwriter Eska; 18-year-old Bridie Monds-Watson’s debut album as Soak; Benjamin Clementine, whose chart-topping success in France has yet to be replicated over here; Architect, by Glaswegian composer C Duncan. The latter is an entrancing work that’s the closest the Mercury prize has come in years to nominating a classical album, albeit one that bears closer resemblance to the oeuvre of indie label 4AD than to Harrison Birtwistle.
The list covers a lot of musical bases, from doughty Britpop survivor (former Supergrass frontman Gaz Coombes) to Grammy-winning electronica (Aphex Twin), and old-fashioned gorblimey punk rock (Slaves). The appearance of the latter duo’s Are You Satisfied? represents the first occasion on which a band who bear comparison to Sham 69 or Splodgenessabounds have received a Mercury nomination.
Beyond the predominance of singer-songwriters, the list offers no sense of a prevalent trend in British music – although the current lowly standing of traditional NME-approved indie rock is reflected by the appearance of only one group to whom you could really apply that term: Wolf Alice. Instead, it majors in idiosyncratic performers, not least former Moloko frontwoman Róisín Murphy, whose Hairless Toys is the latest stop on a solo journey through disco and house music. It’s not beyond the bounds of possibility that she might win, although you can’t rule out Aphex Twin’s chances on the basis of Syro, a reminder of Richard James’s skills after a lengthy silence.
Aside from the handful of surprising absentees – you might reasonably have expected Sleaford Mods to be in there, likewise, folk singer Richard Dawson’s lauded Nothing Important or LoneLady’s brilliant second album Hinterland – there’s no mainstream pop, unless you use that appellation to describe Florence. Nor is there any hard rock or metal, as per usual; or token jazz or folk nomination; nothing that reflects the ongoing revival of fortunes in grime, a genre currently so resurgent that Stormzy can get an uncompromising freestyle rap – over XTC’s underground 2012 instrumental Functions on the Low – into the top 30. A cynical grime fan might suggest that the reason the music isn’t represented is because the album most likely to make the list, Jme’s top 20 hit Integrity, was self-released by an artist who boasts of having “no label, no PR, not publisher, no manager” and who – like a lot of independent artists, or those on small labels – probably didn’t see the point of stumping up the Mercury’s entry fee.