Alt-J wins the 2012 Mercury Prize
The Windish Agency congratulates Alt-J on winning the 2012 Barclaycard Mercury Music Prize for their debut album An Awesome Wave!
This year marked the twentieth anniversary of the Mercury Prize. The Mercury Prize is awarded to the best album of the year by a British or Irish artist, and is determined by a panel of musicians, music executives, journalists and other leading music industry figures. In 2010, the award was presented to another member of the Windish family, The xx.
2012 has been an incredible year for Alt-J. The band released their debut album earlier this year, soon eliciting exceptional reviews from critics of NME, Drowned in Sound, The Guardian and more. The band toured heavily in support of An Awesome Wave, and they've since appeared at festivals across the world. They will play the Australian 2013 Laneway Festival in January through February and have dates scheduled in the UK in the upcoming months.
At a press conference following the ceremony, guitarist Joe Newman told The Guardian, "We are not really used to all this. We're bowled over beyond belief." When asked about An Awesome Wave, keyboardist Gus Unger-Hamilton said, "I love it because we made it, it was just us at uni, just us four guys in a band."