The Brits has long been in the business of underlining success; upsets and shock wins aren’t really the point. If they seemed moderately more exciting in 2025 than in years past, that’s partly because Jack Whitehall is a better, riskier, funnier host than anyone else offered the job in recent years – he mocked Stormzy for his promotion of McDonald’s, made a joke about amyl nitrate and called Coldplay “the musical missionary position” – and because 2024 was a vintage year for mainstream pop, dominated by music that was characterful and hugely successful.
If Charli xcx – and producer AG Cook – hadn’t been lavishly rewarded for her agenda-setting album Brat, you would have wondered what had gone wrong: likewise Chappell Roan, whose ardent emotion both in and out of the recording studio makes her one of pop’s most cheering recent developments: she responded to her two awards with acceptance speeches that called upon the music industry to offer more long-term development support to artists – a theme also picked up on by Myles Smith, winner of the rising star award – and shouted out the trans community and sex workers.
Cannily, the Brits managed to elbow in a third big pop name of 2024, too. The global success award was mysteriously reactivated for the first time in six years and, more mysteriously still, repurposed. Previously given to British artists who’d reaped vast commercial dividends abroad – One Direction, Ed Sheeran, Adele – it went to Sabrina Carpenter, who’s certainly reaped vast commercial dividends over the last 12 months, but hails from Pennsylvania. It’s meant as no smear on Carpenter herself, a witty and self-knowing star whose album Short n’ Sweet went to No 1 in 18 countries and contained a succession of superb, similarly chart-topping singles, but you did rather get the feeling the Brits were making up an award to give to her and – given the absence of Roan – secure her presence at the event itself. She repaid their gesture by performing Espresso with dancers dressed as Coldstream guardsmen and interpolating the song with the strains of Rule! Britannia.
Among the other expected victories, Sam Fender’s success came at the end of a week in which his third album entered the UK charts at No 1, selling more than 100,000 copies in the process; and Fontaines DC won international group on the back of Romance, an album that successfully managed to shift them in a more commercial direction without sacrificing any of their potency or aggression.
Jade Thirlwall was rewarded for a string of solo singles that fit perfectly into the new more expansive pop zeitgeist: with its sample of Sandie Shaw’s Puppet on a String and its sudden shifts in tempo and mood, Angel of My Dreams in particular was vastly more inventive and unpredictable than anything she recorded while a member of Little Mix, underlined by an episodic live performance so peculiar it stole the show.
If Stormzy’s victory over Central Cee in the public vote for hip-hop/grime/rap artist seemed a little surprising – as he pointed out in an acceptance speech that essentially seemed to be suggesting he didn’t think he should have won, the only big hit he’s recently had was from an appearance on Chase and Status’s Backbone – the most striking win was Ezra Collective, and not merely because you might have expected the Cure to win best group instead (both as a nod to the success of Songs of a Lost World, their first album in 16 years, and as a kind of long-service medal). Critics have been suggesting that Ezra Collective might cross over to the mainstream for some years now, more out of hope than expectation: for all the influence they draw from hip-hop, dub, Afrobeat and dance music, they remain at heart a jazz quintet. And yet their career has recently surged. They won the Mercury prize in 2023, scored their first Top 10 album with last year’s Dance, No One’s Watching and became the first British jazz act to headline Wembley Arena: precisely the kind of success that the Brits should be celebrating.
Source: theguardian.com
