The Mercury Prize is supposed to celebrate excellence. How did Fred Again get shortlisted?

The 2023 Mercury Prize won’t be announced until September, but we already have a winner for this year’s most random nominee. A round of applause, please, for “super producer” and songwriter Fred Again!

His spot on the distinguished music award shortlist is part of a long Mercury Prize tradition of championing at least one eye-rollingly bad album each year. In 2022, it was Harry Styles's art-pop pastiche, Harry's House. Back in 2017, it was Ed Sheeran's chart-dominating Divide that split opinion. Is it symptomatic of a wider issue? Probably. A glance at shortlists over the past decade and it's obvious that the Mercurys doesn't quite know what it wants to be. Call it an identity crisis.

You can blame this, in part, on an understandable desire to appeal to as wide an audience as possible – in the past, the Mercury Prize has been accused of snobbery, and failing to acknowledge the music that appeals to the masses. In this day and age, though, with the charts less relevant than ever and streaming providing the opportunity to broaden your musical horizons, it should be easy enough for the Mercury Prize to select albums that do both. This year, it's done a particularly excellent job, both in the quality of this year's shortlist and its sheer eclecticism. Irish folk? Check. London hip-hop? Check. Token jazz album? Check.

Then we have Fred Again, real name Frederick John Philip Gibson, whose inclusion is as perplexing as it is exasperating. If you’re unaware of the 30-year-old producer’s music, you’ve almost certainly heard his songwriting, on cheery chappy George Ezra’s hit single “Shotgun”, and tracks by Ed Sheeran, Stormzy, Rita Ora and AJ Tracey. He won the Brit Award for Best Producer in 2020.

Born in London and educated at the boarding school Malborough College, Gibson is about as blue-blooded as you can get. Perched on the branches of his extensive family tree are barons, earls, and James Bond creator Ian Fleming. One of his first serious forays into a music career was aged 16, enjoying studio time with his neighbour, Brian Eno. When he was 18, Eno asked him to co-produce his 2014 collaboration albums with Karl Hyde, of British electronic group Underworld. His lawyer father’s list of clients – oil companies, pharmaceutical giants and the Ministry of Defence – have been the subject of considerable scrutiny.

None of this has endeared Gibson to his critics, many of whom have chosen the Atlantic-signed artist as the face of all that is wrong with today’s music industry. Particularly for electronic music, where privileged white men already receive more attention, airtime and money than female, Black, and queer producers. When he played the Other Stage at Glastonbury last month, the comments on social media and YouTube were loaded with discussions about appropriation and authenticity.

But let’s get to the music itself. The album he’s been shortlisted for, Actual Life 3 (January 1 – September 9 2022), is a so-so mishmash of ambient techno, house, samples and snatches of recordings from the “real world”. There are vocal contributions from English singer KAMILLE, Irish singer-songwriter Dermot Kennedy, and US rapper Yung Bleu. It’s the latest in a series of musical diary-styled projects, peppered with the kind of life-affirming phrases that you might find on motivational posters in your local gym.

Listening to these records, you struggle to glean anything of note about Gibson’s own thoughts or feelings. In interviews, he's alluded to hospital visits during lockdown, and falling in love with someone who “got very unwell”. The titles certainly hint at fraught experiences (“end of a nightmare”, “pull me out of this”), the palpable lack of warmth in the music itself makes it feel close to clinical. Actual Life 3 is the kind of album a student might throw on as background music while revising, but it doesn’t grip you. It doesn’t make the hairs on the back of your neck stand up. I was at a recent playback for Thomas Bangaltar, of French duo Daft Punk, where he noted how difficult it can be to convey human emotion through electronic music. Gibson has clearly struggled.

The 2023 Mercury Prize shortlist happens to have been unveiled on a day of mourning for the music industry. Sinead O’Connor, the Irish artist who could sing her sorrow like no one else, died aged 56 on Wednesday, leaving behind a complicated legacy of music, activism, mental health struggles. It's a strange coincidence that grief plays a huge role in many of the shortlist’s best picks.

On Loyle Carner’s excellent third album, Hugo, it materialises in songs such as “Speed of Plight”, on which he raps: “Nobody does it, so I did it by myself / I see my brother's ashes sitting on my shelf/ Collecting dust, but I didn't scream for help/ Saw the championship running, I was coming for the belt.” For RAYE – whose battle to liberate herself from her former label, Polydor, made headlines – it rears its head in “Ice Cream Man”, a sexual assault survivor’s warrior cry.

And for Irish folk band Lankum, it’s in their eerie interpretation of “Go Dig My Grave”, a version of which O’Connor covered under the title “The Butcher Boy” in 1998. The traditional folk song, whose rearranged and rewritten verses date as far back as the 17th century, is about a young woman abandoned by her lover who hangs herself, and leaves a suicide note to her father including instructions for her burial.

O’Connor’s fellow Dubliners’ “Go Dig My Grave” opens their sublime fourth record, False Lankum, and sets the tone for their unnerving but faithful take on Irish folk. In many of these songs, they capture a bloodied, menacing darkness with discordant concertinas, drones, jerking rhythms, and singer Radie Peat’s extraordinary voice. They’re one of the strongest contenders on this year’s shortlist.

It’s a rare Mercury Prize shortlist that leaves everyone truly satisfied, but it becomes a more pressing issue when you have so little space to celebrate true excellence. Where was Rina Sawayama’s Hold the Girl, Nines’s Crop Circle 2, or Little Simz’s No Thank You? Fred Again’s place there feels more like a concession than a considered choice. And it’s baffling, given how much choice there is.