The musician is also the youngest ever recipient of the prize, which comes just five years after she posted the lo-fi breakout tracks Break it Off and Pain on TikTok.
Written in the dead of night in her university room, they were rooted in the sounds of UK garage 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 year’s punchy, sample-heavy mixtape Fancy That became her first top 10 album and was nominated for the Mercury Prize.
Unusually, her unique production style, full of skittering breakbeats and sugar strand melodies, is entirely 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 recalls.
She learned the basics by watching YouTube tutorials, taking inspiration from female artists such as Nia Archives, Tinashe and WondaGurl, who “made me feel like it was possible”.
Without the resources to hire a recording studio, she used whatever equipment came 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 a lot 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 anything from your bedroom. And I don’t think that’s a bad thing.”