LONDON: Late rock legend David Bowie was nominated for the prestigious Mercury Prize for his final album, going up against fellow critic favorites Radiohead and Anohni.
“This is music to make sense of our unsettling times — heartfelt, angry, thoughtful and thrilling,” the jury said in a statement announcing the 12 shortlisted albums.
Neither Radiohead nor Bowie have won the Mercury Prize, which was established in 1992 to recognize the top album by a British or Irish artist.Bowie was in the running for “Blackstar,” a career-capping album infused with jazz and lyricism touching on a half-century on the cutting edge of music. Bowie stunned fans by dying two days after the album’s release from an undisclosed battle with cancer.
Radiohead, which holds the Mercury record for most nominated but has never taken the prize, was shortlisted for “A Moon Shaped Pool,” in which the dark experimental rockers inch back to their guitar-rock origins.
Anohni was nominated for “Hopelessness,” a searing political indictment of US foreign policy and the world’s environmental failures that shifts sharply from Anohni’s earlier work with its synthpop sound.
Anohni, who was born in Britain but raised in the United States, saw her career rise after her band Antony and the Johnsons won the Mercury Prize in 2005 for the bleak and deeply personal “I Am a Bird Now.”
Other nominees this year included pop singer Bat for Lashes’s “The Bride,” a concept album about a woman’s fiance dying on the way to the wedding, and the latest works by punk revivalists Savages and danceable alternative rockers The 1975.
“This is music to make sense of our unsettling times — heartfelt, angry, thoughtful and thrilling,” the jury said in a statement announcing the 12 shortlisted albums.
Neither Radiohead nor Bowie have won the Mercury Prize, which was established in 1992 to recognize the top album by a British or Irish artist.Bowie was in the running for “Blackstar,” a career-capping album infused with jazz and lyricism touching on a half-century on the cutting edge of music. Bowie stunned fans by dying two days after the album’s release from an undisclosed battle with cancer.
Radiohead, which holds the Mercury record for most nominated but has never taken the prize, was shortlisted for “A Moon Shaped Pool,” in which the dark experimental rockers inch back to their guitar-rock origins.
Anohni was nominated for “Hopelessness,” a searing political indictment of US foreign policy and the world’s environmental failures that shifts sharply from Anohni’s earlier work with its synthpop sound.
Anohni, who was born in Britain but raised in the United States, saw her career rise after her band Antony and the Johnsons won the Mercury Prize in 2005 for the bleak and deeply personal “I Am a Bird Now.”
Other nominees this year included pop singer Bat for Lashes’s “The Bride,” a concept album about a woman’s fiance dying on the way to the wedding, and the latest works by punk revivalists Savages and danceable alternative rockers The 1975.
