Jazz sensation Ezra Collective (including Trinity Laban alumni Femi Koleoso and Joe Armon-Jones) have been named runners-up in the BBC’s Sound of 2025.
London-based jazz quintet Ezra Collective have secured the Number Two slot on BBC’s Sound of 2025 list. The award is given to rising artists with “the best chance of mainstream success” in the next 12 months. Past winners include Adele, Sam Smith, Michael Kiwanuka, PinkPantheress and Haim. To qualify this year, artists could not have had more than two UK top 10 albums or two UK top 10 singles by 30 September 2024. The nominees were chosen by a panel of more than 180 music industry experts and artists including representatives from Spotify, the Glastonbury Festival and the BBC; as well as musicians such as Sir Elton John, Dua Lipa, Jorja Smith, The Blessed Madonna and Sam Smith. This Monday saw the countdown of the top five Sound of 2025 artists, which included Leeds Band English Teacher, singer Myles Smith, producer and DJ Barry Can’t Swim, Ezra Collective, and Chapell Roan respectively.
The milestone accomplishment follows the release of Ezra Collective’s third, highly-acclaimed studio-album Dance, No One’s Watching last year, charting in the UK top 10. NME gave the album a four-star review, describing it as seeing the “five-piece pivot their style of jazz into hard funk, dub, neo-soul, Afrobeat and highlife”. Recorded over three days at Abbey Road Studios, Dance, No One’s Watching is “an ode to the sacred, yet joyous act of dancing, an album that musically guides you through a night out in the city, from the opening of possibilities as a new evening spans out ahead, to dawn’s final hours as the night comes to a close.” It follows their record Where I’m Meant To Be for which they won the prestigious Mercury Prize in 2023, the first jazz act to do so. Last November, Ezra Collective also became the first jazz act to sell out Wembley Arena. When previously speaking to NME about winning the Mercury Prize, bandleader and Trinity Laban alum Femi Koleoso said: “We were the first jazz act to win, but we weren’t the first jazz act who deserved to win. “I feel that every great jazz moment that came before us was a stepping stone, and we had the blessing of being able to climb up those stones. Even though Ezra Collective won, I really hope that UK jazz felt some pride, because I really saw it as something ‘we’ won, not ‘I’ won.”
Reflecting on the Sound of 2025, Femi Koleoso told the BBC: “We’re just trying to bring something positive and joyful to whoever will listen. So anything that exposes us to more people is always gratefully received.”
Image Credit: Joseph Okpako/WireImage/Getty Images