Please Let Mahalia Win the BRITs Critics Choice Over Two Guitar Lads

We have already made enough jokes on this site about the BRITs Critics’ Choice Award ordaining either solo pop women or extremely Radio 1 A-list men with beards and/or guitars and/or songs for people who don’t really love music. So I’ll keep this brief. Next week, we’re all going to find out who – between Leicester’s Mahalia, Scottish singer-songwriter Lewis Capaldi and North Shields’ Sam Fender – wins the 2019 award. And dear god, I hope it’s Mahalia.

Sure, I’m biased – she’s the only one of the three acts who I’ve interviewed. But her music also resonates in ways that I think will in years to come, when people (I guess people in the industry? Someone editing the BRITs Critics Choice Award Wiki page?) look back on the 2019 shortlist. Sonically, as you can guess from the headline, Sam and Lewis are your classic guitar-playing singers. They follow in the footsteps of past winners like Tom Odell, James Bay and other men whose music – while utterly inoffensive – would probably taste like unsalted oats porridge, if it were a breakfast dish. Lewis doesn’t sing in his accent over heartfelt songs about relationships, which is fine. Sam tries to really get deep in ways that can easily backfire. Again, that’s OK. But Mahalia has managed to tap into the depths of romantic relationships and friendships, while also giving UK R&B a much-needed boost in a year that’s seen the genre shine. For that, she deserves her moment.

I know this might be a hard sell, since Jorja Smith won last year’s award. It’d be easy to lump them together as too similar to both win – two soulful mixed-ethnicity women from outside London etc. Last year’s shortlist, completed by rapper-singer Stefflon Don and Mabel, felt like it made sense. All three artists captured a particular moment in pop music indebted to different parts of the black diaspora, whether in rap, dancehall inflections, soul or R&B. This year, Mahalia could easily be dismissed as ‘doing what Jorja already has’ but that’d be a misreading of her work. You could loosely dub her an R&B artist, but her background is in writing folk-tinged slow jams on acoustic guitar, which she dubbed “psycho-acoustic soul.” Really, this year’s shortlist is more of a guitar-playing triad. Mahalia has managed to bridge those adolescent releases (she was signed at 13) with music that speaks more frankly about relationships.

Nothing exemplifies that more than her crossover appeal in the US. Like fellow Brit Ella Mai, who probably soundtracked thousands of “Boo’d Up” make-outs this summer, Mahalia wrote a series of tracks that resonated with young people in the US – and young black or brown women in particular. Her single “Sober,” from last autumn, helped propel her into the speakers and headphones of enough people to make a North American tour viable. "I Wish I Missed My Ex" (above) then followed earlier this year. And unlike Sam and Lewis, she did that without making the BBC Sound of 2018 longlist (both men appeared on it, before Norwegian pop star Sigrid took away the prize).

As far as Lewis’ music goes, it’s perfectly orchestrated pop. Slow piano lines, and that ‘singing as though I’m also chewing on toffee voice’ lend this sort of music an authenticity that radio listeners lap up. He is a good songwriter, with a knack for transitioning between verse and chorus in a way that’s both familiar and uplifting. But his music isn’t necessarily pushing a conversation forward. It’s just… fine. When it comes to guitar-based acts who could’ve been nominated, I’d say bands like Sports Team, Dream Wife, Sorry and Goat Girl are doing more to actually make their instruments sound knock-you-over-the-head exciting.

And Sam Fender? He has lots of potential, and does his best to tackle heavy topics in his music. At times, lyrically, it works, as on “Dead Boys Prelude” and its treatise on the high rates of male suicide. But the melodic work, his harmonic choices, the chord progressions: they’re so safe. His music sounds like it was written while tiptoeing around the boundaries of what a song can be, rather than trying to smash those limits to bits. And like a lot of young men, Sam might look back on some of the lyrics he wrote in his early twenties (AKA now) and cringe. Track “Poundland Kardashians” (above) is exactly the sort of thing a man in his late forties who “hates” Kylie Jenner yet still clicks on articles about her online would find exceptionally clever. In an attempt to express his disdain at… I guess self-obsession and narcissism, Sam misses the mark. Rather than skewering the broader systems of consumerism and woman-hating 'aspirational' media, he just hits the surface level and implies that people with self-tans and lip fillers are idiots. He doesn't help his listeners understand the deep, steady roots of that apparent idiocy.

So look, none of these three are making industrial noise-rock crossed with a bit of drone. We're talking about pop music here. Whoever wins is going to get even more of a major-label push, to help them make more money. While Mahalia may not be to everyone's taste, to me she speaks to universal themes without appearing trite; she knows how to distill the quivering thrum of our connections with other people into digestible, almost snackable soul-pop. And that's more than can be said of the almost lumbering dullness of Lewis Capaldi or Sam Fender's 'just took his first hit of the bong and really thought about the world' ethos. Come next Friday, any of them could win. But I know who I'd back.

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