By: Spacelab Research Staff

Canada's Polaris Music Prize is back with their Long List of names, soon to be reduced to a Short List, and then, boom! Winner. It's their own version of the New Pantheon (US) or Australian Music Prize, Canada-style.

This year's finalists include some of the good names you'd expect — Leonard Cohen, Fucked Up, Handsome Furs, Metric, Pink Mountaintops, Wolf Parade, all semi-global names in their own right.

Other Polaris Music Prize winners include Caribou (2008), Patrick Watson (2007) and Final Fantasy (2006).

The Polaris Music Prize Gala will be held September 21st in Toronto. You can listen to the event and all of the performances on the CBC live broadcast, or on Sirius Satellite Radio.

The jury will vote from the Long List to determine the Short List of 10, to be revealed July 7 at the Drake Hotel in Toronto. The winner will receive $20,000 (thus the prize), judged solely on artistic merit, without regard to genre or record sales. The Polaris Music Prize is awarded to the best full-length Canadian album released from June 1, 2008 to May 31, 2009.

The list was selected by 180 members of the Polaris Music Prize jury, which consists of music journalists, broadcasters and bloggers from across Canada. They try to avoid bias or old school deal-making by making sure that no music industry personnel with direct financial relationships with artists vote for Polaris.

Check out the bands on the Short List below:

 STREAM: Fucked Up

 STREAM: Handsome Furs

 STREAM: Japandroids

 STREAM: Land Of Talk

 STREAM: Malajube

 STREAM: Pink Mountaintops

 STREAM: Charles Spearin

 STREAM: Chad VanGaalen