FEATURE
New Forms
Talkin’ Loud released Roni Size / Reprazent’s New Forms on 23 June 1997. It reached number 8 in Britain, stayed on the chart for 46 weeks, and won the Mercury Prize.
- format
- Feature
- volume
- 6
- date
- Jun 23, 2026
- author
- CJ Archer
- places
- Bristol
- artists
- Roni Size
- words
- 311 words · 1 min
New Forms is the album by Roni Size / Reprazent, released by Talkin’ Loud on 23 June 1997. The producers are Roni Size, DJ Die, Krust and DJ Suv, a Bristol crew working as one group. Onallee and Dynamite MC are the voices. Britain put the album at number 8 and kept it on the chart for 46 weeks. In 1997 it won the Mercury Prize, a drum-and-bass record judged against the year’s rock and pop and preferred. The singles are the doors. Share the Fall came out on 19 May 1997 and reached number 37. Heroes, on 11 September, reached number 31. Brown Paper Bag, on 27 October, reached number 20.
The music is drum and bass with jazz harmony, live bass, and songs that are allowed to be songs. Brown Paper Bag is the one that explains the prize to a non-specialist: an upright bass, a break, a room. Share the Fall is Onallee, a chorus you can hum, a tempo that does not apologise. Four producers agreed on a palette and then let singers and an MC inhabit it. Full Cycle, their own label, is the other half of the story. Talkin’ Loud is the door that got the Mercury committee into the room.
Black Secret Technology, two years earlier, had already shown that jungle could be an author’s album. New Forms is the one the prize culture could see, because the jazz instruments and the vocal hooks gave it a shape the committee recognised. The dancers already knew. Forty-six weeks on the chart is a long time for a double album of breaks. The prize is a fact. Brown Paper Bag is the reason the fact does not feel like a category error.