Olivia Deansgate – the Brits-themed renaming of Manchester’s Deansgate railway station – was prophetic. After the awards in 2025, when Charli xcx went home with a bulging wheelie suitcase, and 2024, when Raye won an unprecedented six Brits, Olivia Dean is now the anointed one, with boxes ticked in all the categories in which she was nominated, including the big two: best album and artist.
It’s hard to argue. Awards ceremonies like the Brits tend to reward success, and Dean’s inescapable single Man I Need held a stranglehold on UK attention spans in 2025 and into this year; three other tracks joined it in the top 10 simultaneously last October. The album most of them came from, The Art of Loving – her second – went to No 1 three times and has now broken Adele’s record as the longest-running No 1 by a female artist this decade. It helps that Dean’s songs about romantic mishaps are both characterful and relatable.
Elsewhere justice was served predictably, with no real shocks to the system and just one note on semantics. Lola Young, another international success, walked away with a thoroughly deserved best breakthrough artist gong. This award was known for a long time as best new artist. Given Young is on her third album, greener contenders such as Skye Newman – only one EP old – might feel a tad aggrieved.
The Boy Who Played the Harp – aka the superlative rapper Dave – reprised his previous victories (a 2022 hip-hop category win and a 2020 best album), comfortably edging out the new generation represented by Central Cee and Jim Legxacy as well as the incendiary Little Simz, always nominated, never rewarded.
Little Simz’s former producer, Inflo, is the primary force in Sault, winners of the R&B award – which might have made for some awkward green-room moments: they are in a legal battle over money.
The one truly hard-to-call victory of the night was for best international artist. The flamenco/R&B artist Rosalía beat huge names such as Bad Bunny, Sabrina Carpenter, Taylor Swift, Chappell Roan and Lady Gaga for the win with Lux, an album about female religious mystics and renunciates sung in Spanish and 13 other languages.
Photograph by Zak Hussein/Billboard via Getty Images
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