Recommendations of the Editorial team
The British multi-instrumentalist and bedroom producer Emma-Jean Thakray has the Sound Check Award receive. The Londoner was awarded for her record “Weirdo” and beat the Berlin jury from Radioeins and Tagesspiegel against the also nominated Blood Orange, Turnstile and Die Heiterheit.
A statement from the jury said: “In a year without big names, the choice fell on the extraordinary work of an artist who stands for herself – in the cruel double meaning of the word. Thackray stands out as a multi-talented person who has recorded 123 instruments in her apartment and in the studio alone. But she also stands alone because her music hardly finds any public response. Although she was nominated for the prestigious British Mercury Prize, she hardly appears publicly as a solo artist.”
The musician, who became known as a trumpeter in the vibrant British jazz scene in the circle of Moses Boyd and Nubya Garcia, has an autistic disorder and an ADHD diagnosis. She didn’t feel comfortable there. “I always had the feeling that the others knew a set of rules that was closed to me,” she told the Guardian. “I was called a ‘weirdo’. I’ve reclaimed the word.”
Soul-Funk as a rollercoaster of emotions
The jury’s statement goes on to say about the award-winning album: “‘I’m a weirdo,’ Thackray sings with the self-confidence of a soul singer on her second album, without sparing her audience the consequences of this analysis. Her masterfully modernly arranged soul-funk numbers articulate a rollercoaster of emotions. At one point she asks that people stay with her, only to shortly afterwards demand just as intensely: Leave me alone. In ‘Save Me’ she wishes “To be put back together like something broken lying on the floor in pieces. The confession of a woman who can no longer be helped.”
The record was particularly influenced by the death of Thackray’s partner while she was working on the new songs. “I felt so lost, I didn’t know who I was anymore,” she said, describing the experience of being sucked into a kind of black hole. Music provided an escape – the “only way to feel emotionally regulated.”
“In addition to fusion influences that range from Frank Zappa to Herbie Hancock, she masterfully incorporates the retro-futurism of George Clinton,” the jury members added in their statement. “Still, ‘Weirdo’ stands apart from the calculated eclecticism of streaming pop. The album is committed to its own crazy world, representing as much the possibilities of the digital world as its destructive dynamics.”
The Soundcheck Award has been presented since 2009 and is based on all those albums that received the top rating four times in the “Soundcheck” program broadcast on Radioeins on Fridays. In 2025 there were 28 works from which a 50-member jury of music journalists and initially selected the shortlist of four titles.
The prize is a poster graphic created specifically for each winner by New York artist Otto Steininger. Last year, the Berlin rapper Apsilon was honored for the album “Haut wie Pelz”. Other award winners: The Black Keys, Neil Young, Tocotronic, Bilderbuch, James Blake and Tristan Brusch.
