With this year's Mercury Music Prize due to be announced this evening, bookmakers suggest that the Arctic Monkeys are runaway favourites to scoop the prize, which is awarded to the best new album by a British or Irish act.
The Sheffield band's first album, Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not, has been sweeping all before it since its release in February, when it became the fastest-selling debut in British chart history, and is rated by bookmakers as an odd-on favourite for the £20,000 award. The band's combination of choppy guitars and wry observations of teenage life in Yorkshire has also been winning rapturous receptions at this summer's festivals.
Judges for the prize - these days sponsored by Nationwide - described the record as "great songs, astonishingly performed". However, they offer equally fulsome praise for the other contenders, and furthermore have a history of contrary decision-making.
When Radiohead's OK Computer was released in 1997 it was immediately greeted as a classic, but was beaten to that year's Mercury by Bristol drum'n'basser Roni Size's less widely appreciated New Forms. Similarly, Blur's Parklife, which heralded the Britpop boom, was seen off by M People in 1994.
Yet the judges are sufficiently unpredictable that favourites do occasionally win - as with Franz Ferdinand, the Arctic Monkeys' Domino labelmates, in 2004.
Should the judges pass on the Arctic Monkeys, other contenders for the prize include lugubrious crooner Richard Hawley, for Coles Corner; proggy festival favourites Muse, for Black Holes and Revelations; and arty electropoppers Hot Chip, for The Warning.
The award will be announced at a central London ceremony this evening, and results are expected to be made public soon after 11pm.
Mercury shortlist in full
Arctic Monkeys: Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not
Isobel Campbell & Mark Lanegan: Ballad of the Broken Seas
Editors: The Back Room
Guillemots: Through the Windowpane
Richard Hawley: Coles Corner
Hot Chip: The Warning
Muse: Black Holes & Revelations
Zoe Rahman: Melting Pot
Lou Rhodes: Beloved One
Scritti Politti: White Bread Black Beer
Sway: This is My Demo
Thom Yorke: The Eraser
