Sam Fender Wins The 2025 Mercury Prize

Sam Fender likely thought things couldn’t get better when it was announced that the ceremony for this year’s Mercury Prize award would be held in his home city of Newcastle.

However, it has gotten better, with the Seventeen Going Under star taking home this year’s award with his album, People Watching.

The Mercury Prize is a prestigious annual music prize awarded for the best album released by a musical act from the UK or Ireland. Created by Jon Webster and Robert Chandler in association with the British Phonographic Industry and British Association of Record Dealers in 1992, the award ceremony provides an alternative to the BRIT Awards.

While Fender took home this year’s award, he had stiff competition in rock band Wolf Alice, Britpop icons Pulp, post-punk chameleons Fontaines D.C., plus FKA twigs, PinkPantheress, CMAT, Jacob Alon, Emma-Jean Thackray, rapper Pa Salieu, jazz pianist Joe Webb, and folk artist Martin Carthy.

People Watching was released in February of this year and is the follow-up to Fender’s hugely successful second album, Seventeen Going Under. Produced by The War On Drugs’ Adam Granduciel, along with Markus Dravs (Coldplay, Florence + The Machine), Fender himself, and his bandmates Dean Thompson and Joe Atkinson, the album is lush.

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The album’s eleven epics explore “colourful stories and observations of everyday characters living their everyday, but often extraordinary, lives,” according to Fender. In Australia, the album peaked at #17 on the ARIA Albums Chart.

Last year, indie rockers English Teacher won the prize for their debut album This Could Be Texas.

Next month, Sam Fender will tour across Australia, playing huge shows in Melbourne, Brisbane, Sydney, Adelaide, and Perth, plus a special headline performance at this year’s Changing Tides festival in Kiama alongside Noah Cyrus, Holly Humberstone, The Rions, MAY-A, and many others.

Reviewing Fender’s show at Perth’s HBF Stadium in July 2023, The Music’s Sam Mead wrote: “Fender manages to create these wonderful soundscapes that brilliantly build and build like a wave as each instrument is introduced until they crescendo into a glorious moment of bliss like something in an 80s coming-of-age movie.”