Nia Archives performing in Amsterdam on 16 November 2024
Nia Archives performing in Amsterdam on 16 November 2024
The break under “Vertical” is modelled on 1990s breakbeat, and the voice over it is soft enough to belong to a different record. That contrast between hard drums and a gentle lead vocal runs through Emotional Junglist, the second album from Nia Archives, and on 22 October it is one of 12 albums in contention when the Mercury Prize is decided at Newcastle’s Utilita Arena.
It is her second shortlisting in two albums. Her debut, Silence Is Loud, made the list in 2024, according to the Yorkshire Evening Post. For a producer who built her name on jungle, a style that is often sidelined, two nominations from two records is a clear measure of how far the sound has travelled.
The Shortlist and the Night
The Mercury Prize celebrates the best UK and Irish albums of the past year, with the shortlist chosen by an independent panel of music industry professionals, Radio X explains. The 2026 list of 12 was announced on 30 July. It puts Emotional Junglist alongside Paul McCartney’s The Boys of Dungeon Lane, Florence + The Machine’s Everybody Scream, Dave’s The Boy Who Played the Harp, RAYE’s This Music May Contain Hope, Olivia Dean’s The Art of Loving and Suede’s Antidepressants.
The rest of the field is Knats with A Great Day in Newcastle, Kojey Radical with Don’t Look Down, Jade with That’s Showbiz Baby!, Dove Ellis with Blizzard, and the War Child charity album Help(2), which features members of Blur, Arctic Monkeys and Portishead among many others, the Yorkshire Evening Post reports.
The ceremony takes place on Thursday 22 October at the Utilita Arena in Newcastle, its second year in the city after the prize left London for the first time in 2025. Many of the shortlisted artists will perform on the night, which ends with the winner being named and a live encore, Radio X reports. Last year the prize went to Sam Fender for People Watching.
What Is on Emotional Junglist
Emotional Junglist came out on 17 July as a Hijinxx and Island release and runs to 15 tracks, according to its Apple Music listing. Jorja Smith features on “Get Me Down” and Sampha also appears on the record, DJ Mag notes.
The reviews describe a record that uses jungle as a base rather than a rulebook. NME heard a blend of Britpop, R&B and jungle, and an album more focused on Nia’s inner world than on her breakbeats, moving from the forward come-ons of “Danger” to the lovesick “Vertical”, the indie riffs of “This Could Be…” and “Dance With Me 2nite”, and the exposed writing of “Tender” and “Lover’s Grief” before “Boys in Blue” closes it out. The review also warned that some fans may be surprised by how little conventional jungle the record contains.
Grimy Goods pointed to the range on either side of that core: the radio-ready pop of “Dance With Me 2nite”, the night-time R&B of “The Darkest Hour” with Sampha, and the mix of jungle with indie rock and pop-punk on “There Goes Ma Head” and “Boys in Blue”. The common thread is the one in the title. Nia described being an emotional junglist as feeling everything and nothing at once, and said that at 26 she feels she is entering womanhood.
How the Programming Holds Together
The engineering question is how a record this varied still sounds like one artist. Grimy Goods located the answer in a habit carried over from her early releases: hard-hitting drums set against softly sung vocals, with neither allowed to win. On “Feelingz Go Numb”, the bass punches hard while the vocal is chopped into rhythmic fragments, so the voice works as another percussion line rather than sitting on top of the mix.
That is a classic jungle move put to new use. The style has always been built from cut-up breakbeats and weight in the low end, with a vocal often treated as a sample to be sliced and repeated. On Emotional Junglist the voice is usually the lead instead, and the drums carry the energy underneath it. On a large system the effect is two speeds at once: the breaks drive the floor, while the melody moves slowly enough to sing along to.
It also explains why the record can turn towards indie or R&B without losing its footing. When the drums are the constant, the arrangement around them can change from track to track. NME’s point about the shortage of conventional jungle and Grimy Goods’ point about the steady drum-and-voice contrast are two views of the same design decision.
From a Student Loan to Two Shortlists
Nia Archives was born in Bradford and raised in Horsforth, the Yorkshire Evening Post notes, and Grimy Goods dates the start of the project to 2020, funded by way of a student loan. Her timing helped: her move towards jungle coincided with a wider comeback for 1990s house music, Grimy Goods notes.
Silence Is Loud reached the 2024 shortlist in the year that Leeds band English Teacher won the prize with This Could Be Texas. English Teacher are back on the 2026 list too, through their contribution to Help(2). NME’s review opens by crediting Nia with bringing jungle back to life, and a second nomination makes that claim harder to dispute.
Six Years of Singles Behind Two Albums
The Nia Archives catalogue on Apple Music shows how patiently the project was built. It starts with “Sober Feels” in June 2020 and “Don’t Kid Urself” a month later, followed by the five-track Headz Gone West EP in April 2021. Singles kept coming through 2022, including “Luv Like”, “Mash up the Dance” and “So Tell Me…”, before the six-track Sunrise Bang Ur Head Against Tha Wall EP arrived in March 2023.
Silence Is Loud, the debut album, came out on 12 April 2024 with 13 tracks. The gap before the second record was filled by two singles, “Get Loose” in April 2025 and “Maia Maia” that September, and the Emotional Junglist campaign opened with “Danger” on 26 March 2026, almost four months ahead of the album.
Some habits run all the way through. The z-for-s spellings stretch from “Forbidden Feelingz” in 2021 and “Crowded Roomz” in 2024 to “Feelingz Go Numb” on the new record, and the club titles of the early singles sit next to the album’s more inward songs without strain. For listeners meeting her through the shortlist, that means a deep catalogue behind the two albums, most of it written for the floor.
On the Road Either Side of Newcastle
The ceremony falls in the middle of a world tour. DJ Mag reports 19 dates across Asia, North America, Europe and Australia, which began in September with Osaka and Tokyo and runs to January 2027.
After Newcastle, the North American leg takes in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Montréal, Toronto and New York between 6 and 13 November. The European run starts in Glasgow on 22 November and continues through Nottingham, Bristol, London, Manchester, Berlin, Amsterdam and Brussels before ending in Dublin on 8 December. Two Australian shows, in Melbourne and Sydney on 6 and 7 January, close the tour.
What a Second Nomination Means for Jungle
A Mercury shortlist puts records in front of listeners who never read a club listing, and this one puts a jungle-rooted album beside Paul McCartney, Florence + The Machine and Dave. Grimy Goods described the record as lifting a part of music that is often sidelined. Whatever happens in Newcastle, both of Nia Archives’ albums have now made the Mercury shortlist.
The revival also reaches well beyond the UK, as the Lviv producer who finished a drum and bass and jungle hybrid through Ukraine’s blackout winter shows. The sound Nia helped bring back is being rebuilt in studios far from Bradford.
“On Emotional Junglist the breaks are still there, they just stopped being the headline. That is a harder record to make than a straight jungle album, and it is the one the Mercury judges put on their list,” the ElectronicMusic.News curator team said.
The verdict arrives on 22 October, and the tour picks up again in North America a fortnight later.
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