In 2021, a young singer from west London did something that pop stars are generally advised never to do: she went public with her anger. Raye, then still tied to a label that would not let her release a studio album, accused it of keeping her talent in a drawer, and for a while it seemed that the gesture might end her career rather than rescue it. This week, in Newcastle, she stood on a stage holding the 2026 Mercury Prize, and the drawer, it turned out, had held rather a lot. The winning record, This Music May Contain Hope, is a 73-minute marathon that moves through big band jazz, power balladry and funk with the confidence of someone making up for lost time.

It topped the UK charts and produced Where Is My Husband!, a lead single that reached number one in Britain and number six in the United States, powered by a rat-a-tat delivery in which romantic disappointment, including the "lonely acrobatics" of unzipping a dress alone at 2am, becomes comedy. Yet the same artist has also written, with unflinching seriousness, about a sexual assault by a music producer, and it is perhaps this range, from slapstick to scar tissue, that the judges found so persuasive. Not everyone was won over so completely.

The Guardian's pop critic, Alexis Petridis, allowed that the album has flaws, though he judged that it pays off more often than it fails. The panel, however, praised its scale, structure, ambition and sheer charm, and the £25,000 prize joins a run that began with six Brit awards, still a record for a single ceremony, for her debut album My 21st Century Blues. At 28, Raye, born Rachel Keen, has become proof that an industry's refusal can be a form of unintended patronage.