The musician can also be the youngest ever recipient of the prize, which comes simply 5 years after she posted the lo-fi breakout tracks Break it Off and Pain on TikTok.
Written in the useless of night time in her college room, they had been rooted in the sounds of UK storage and drum and bass, and the buzz earned her the BBC’s Sound of 2022 award.
Since then, she’s racked up over one billion streams and scored a major worldwide hit with 2023’s Boy’s a Liar, Pt. 2. Last yr’s punchy, sample-heavy mixtape Fancy That turned her first high 10 album and was nominated for the Mercury Prize.
Unusually, her distinctive manufacturing fashion, filled with skittering breakbeats and sugar strand melodies, is solely self-taught.
“When I was 17, I was at a girl’s school and I had a friend who was a singer, and she wanted someone to produce for her. And I was like, ‘I’ll do it’,” she remembers.
She discovered the fundamentals by watching YouTube tutorials, taking inspiration from feminine artists corresponding to Nia Archives, Tinashe and WondaGurl, who “made me feel like it was possible”.
Without the assets to rent a recording studio, she used no matter tools got here to hand.
“Quite literally, I did not have a microphone, but I had a karaoke game on the Nintendo Wii and they gave you a mic with the game. And I just was like, ‘It has a USB connection, maybe it will work plugged it in’.
“It was loads of trial and error.”
Even now, she records many of her vocals at home, with a sock stretched over the microphone to prevent popping and sibilance.
“You can do something out of your bed room. And I do not suppose that is a nasty factor.”
