By David Topping

This year’s Polaris Prize—the twenty thousand dollar prize for the Canadian album released between June 1, 2008 and May 31, 2009 with the most “artistic merit without regard to genre, sales history or label affiliation”—has announced its forty-album long list, to be narrowed down to a short list on July 7, and one winner announced at a gala on September 21. (Last year’s award went to Caribou; 2007′s went to Patrick Watson; 2006′s, the prize’s inaugural year, went to Final Fantasy.) The albums by Toronto (or Toronto-area) bands in the running? Bruce Peninsula’s A Mountain Is A Mouth; D-Sisive’s Let The Children Die; Elliott Brood’s Mountain Meadows; Fucked Up’s The Chemistry Of Common Life; Great Lake Swimmers’ Lost Channels; K-OS’s YES!; K’NAAN’s Troubadour; Metric’s Fantasies; One Hundred Dollars’ Forest Of Tears; Charles Spearin’s The Happiness Project; and Timber Timbre’s Timber Timbre. If you count Hamiltonians as Torontonians, and why not, you can add The Arkells’ Jackson Square and Junior Boys’ Begone Dull Care to the mix.