Wolf Alice - Mercury Prize

Thursday night saw the announcement for the winner of the 2018 Hyundai Mercury Prize, which is an award that “celebrates artistic achievement across a range of contemporary music genres”, culminating in the choosing of an Album of the Year.

Amongst the shortlisted — which is generally chosen from around three hundred different musicians — was Arctic Monkeys, Everything Everything, Noel Gallagher’s Flying Birds and Florence + The Machine, but it was ultimately North London’s genre-bending rockers, Wolf Alice, that took home the prize.

‘Visions of a Life’ is their second album and was released last September. Wolf Alice have a knack of not fitting into a specific box and with this album, they fleet back and forth from hard hitting basement grunge, to ethereal whispering shoegaze. It is this ability to transcend genres that likely tipped the win, in their favour. 

Words by Tyler Damara Kelly