Raye wins 2026 Mercury Prize for This Music May Contain Hope.

Raye won the 2026 Mercury Prize on Thursday night for her second album, This Music May Contain Hope., beating a shortlist that included Sir Paul McCartney, Olivia Dean and the former Little Mix singer Jade, the prize's organisers announced. The result came at the end of a live ceremony at Newcastle's Utilita Arena, hosted by the BBC Radio 6 Music presenter Lauren Laverne and broadcast on BBC Four, BBC iPlayer, BBC Radio 6 Music and BBC Sounds.

The trophy, presented by the broadcaster Sian Eleri on behalf of the judging panel, carries £25,000 in prize money and recognition as the best British or Irish album released in the preceding year. Raye performed the track "I Hate The Way I Look Today" immediately after accepting the award, to a standing ovation, the Official Charts Company reported.

A long wait for pop

This Music May Contain Hope. is the first predominantly pop album to win the Mercury Prize since M People's Elegant Slumming took the award in 1994, a gap of 32 years, the BBC reported from the ceremony. The 17-track, 73-minute record, released in March and divided into four sections, moves between jazz, soul, R&B and classical arrangements; it credits more than 100 musicians, four separate orchestras and a guest appearance from the soul singer Al Green. It debuted at number one on the UK albums chart, and its single "Where Is My Husband!" also topped the singles chart, according to the Official Charts Company, which compiles both rankings.

In its citation, the Mercury Prize's ten-person judging panel — chaired by the broadcaster Jeff Smith and including the musicians Jamie Cullum and AFRODEUTSCHE alongside Danielle Perry, MistaJam, Phil Alexander, Sophie Williams, Sian Eleri, Lea Brook and the critic Will Hodgkinson — praised the record's "scale, structure, ambition and charm," saying it blends old Hollywood glamour with gritty realism in telling the story of a young woman navigating love and daily life, and that the panel agreed it would "inspire people for years to come." Critics had already made similar claims before the judges did: Rolling Stone wrote of the record's "old-school show-tune razzle-dazzle" and "big-band swing frills," while the NME said Raye's "agile voice has never sounded so good, and her pen has never been so strong."

Stolen notebooks, then a record

Raye told the BBC that work on the album nearly derailed two years ago, when her car was stolen along with the notebooks and demo recordings she had been using to write it. The material was eventually recovered, but the theft set the project back by almost a year. "I was distraught. I was very worried, but you know, it all turned out great," she said. "Every little slip, every little accident, every little thing, it creates the path that you take."

"I made this album not focusing on commercial success, not focusing on making things cookie-cutter," Raye said backstage after the win. "Some of these songs are seven minutes. They're indulgent. They're maximalist."

The win extends a run of outsized recognition for the 28-year-old singer, born Rachel Keen, who in 2024 won six Brit Awards in a single night — a ceremony record that broke a four-award mark previously shared by Blur, Harry Styles and Adele — largely on the strength of her debut album, My 21st Century Blues, and its hit single "Escapism." This Music May Contain Hope. is only her second full-length release, and the Mercury win is her first.

Runners-up and what comes next

Olivia Dean had entered the ceremony as bookmakers' favourite for her own second album, The Art of Loving, which had already been named album of the year at this year's Brit Awards and the Mobo Awards and is widely expected to earn a Grammy nomination in the same category when the Recording Academy announces its 2027 nominees next month. "I don't think I've processed it yet, to be honest," Dean told the BBC backstage. "I feel like I'm still in this crazy whirlwind of it all." McCartney, Jade, the drum-and-bass artist Nia Archives, the band Suede and the war-charity compilation Help(2), whose contributors included Pulp and Florence + the Machine, were also shortlisted but did not win. Jade's nomination, for her solo debut That's Showbiz, Baby!, made her the first former X Factor winner to be shortlisted for the prize, according to the BBC.

All twelve shortlisted acts performed at the Utilita Arena before the result was read out, among them Dove Ellis, Florence + the Machine, Jade, the Geordie jazz act Knats, Kojey Radical, Nia Archives, Dean and Raye herself; Pulp performed in place of the various artists credited on Help(2). The Mercury Prize's shortlist is drawn up each summer by an independent panel of music-industry professionals, with the overall winner decided by the same judges on the night of the ceremony.

The ceremony marked the second consecutive year the Mercury Prize has been staged in Newcastle, in partnership with Newcastle City Council, and was accompanied by a fringe programme of more than thirty events across the city running from 15 to 22 October. Last year's winner, the Newcastle-born singer-songwriter Sam Fender, donated his own £25,000 prize to grassroots music venues around the UK. Established in 1992, the award has historically favoured debut and genre-defining records over commercial pop: of its last 35 winners, twenty were first albums, and this year's shortlist of twelve contained only two, Dove Ellis's Blizzard and Jade's That's Showbiz, Baby!. For Raye, who built her early career writing songs for other artists before breaking through on her own, the award adds a second major British music prize to a recorded catalogue that is still only two albums deep.