This year's just-announced Scottish Album of the Year (SAY) Award shortlist is perhaps the most surprising to date.

It is full of wonder - Kathryn Joseph's visceral piano psalms, Honeyblood's stadium-bound noise-pop, Happy Meals' intoxicating disco-chanson. And so too does it transcend genres - from hip-hop and techno through electro-prog, soul and rock 'n' roll.

But there are disappointments, too: longlisted (and, in some cases, career-defining) albums from The Twilight Sad, Withered Hand, Mogwai, King Creosote, Treacherous Orchestra and The Phantom Band all failed to make this year's cut.

The shortlist was announced by Janice Forsyth at the CCA last night. Nine of these albums were decided by an independent judging panel, and one (Paolo Nutini) was elected by public vote. The judging panel will decided on a final winner who'll be announced at Glasgow's 02 ABC on June 17. The winner receives £20,000 (and joins the ranks of fellow victors Bill Wells and Aidan Moffat, RM Hubbert and Young Fathers), with shortlisted runners-up each receiving £1,000.

Here's a guide to 2015's shortlisted albums, in alphabetical order.

The Amazing Snakeheads: Amphetamine Ballads (Domino)

In what may be the SAY Award's most punk-rock moment to date, Glasgow rock 'n' roll degenerates The Amazing Snakeheads have already self-annihilated. They released their high-octane debut album, Amphetamine Ballads, to mass fervour last year, and found favour with the likes of Alex Kapranos (Franz Ferdinand) and The Jesus And Mary Chain - thanks to a breakneck line in baleful blues-rock and slashing guitar riffs that variously invoked The Birthday Party and fellow Dear Green deviants Uncle John And Whitelock. But in February this year, the Snakeheads announced news of their (un)timely blues self-implosion: "never, ever to return".

Belle And Sebastian: Girls In Peacetime Want To Dance (Matador)

The ninth LP from Glasgow's lionised indie dons saw Stuart Murdoch and co fire up the glitterball that had long shimmered beneath their erudite chamber-pop. Lead single The Party Line came on like Giorgio Moroder clad in glam-rock and C86, and its sense of disco-pop jubilation refracted across the rest of the record. It's almost 20 years since Belle And Sebastian formed, and early cult-pop masterworks like Tigermilk will always have a place in our hearts, but Girls In Peacetime... re-affirmed B&S as a forward-looking (and, dear lord, thrusting) proposition: it proved there's lots of life, and tunes, and tales, in the old dog (on wheels) yet.

Errors: Lease of Life (Rock Action)

"We felt it was make or break time with this record," Errors' Steev Livingstone told The Herald last month - and true to this, Lease Of Life pulls out all the stops, from choirs to disco-panpipes to saxophones. Their fourth long-player's kosmische soundscapes toy with notions of what is "real" (that is to say, organic) and what is not (ergo, machine-produced) - and it makes for a glorious, uncanny trip through retro-futuristic hymns stalked by the ghosts of ancient folk melodies, as the dreamy Glasgow electro-prog trio explore cyber-anxiety, dystopian realms and the earthly wonder of human contact.

Happy Meals: Apero (Night School)

Glasgow's mighty Night School records (run by Michael Kasparis, a man once immortalised in song by Franz Ferdinand) has pulled myriad counter-pop blinders of late - recent releases include The Space Lady, Apostille and Strawberry Switchblade's Rose McDowall - but even by those standards, Happy Meals are something special. A hallucinogenic dream-pop duo from Glasgow via other planets, their glorious debut album, Apero, sees Suzanne Rodden and Lewis Cook (aka Mother Ganga) helm a cosmic-disco voyage through tropical synth-pop, Casio chanson, Orange Juice-doused post-punk, early-80s Hacienda, geometric cocktail-jazz and intoxicating Gallic house.

Honeyblood: Honeyblood (Fat Cat)

There is a distinct sense that Honeyblood will be superstars before too long. And rightly so. The Edinburgh alt-rock duo's swaggering, eponymous debut made for a perfect calling card - all bittersweet noise-pop and blues-punk chorales - and it heralded a major new songwriting talent in singer/guitarist Stina Tweeddale. From yearning alt-country (Bud, I'd Rather Be Anywhere But Here) through visceral, literate garage-pop (Choker, Biro) to sublime Americana (Braidburn Valley), they don't put a foot (or guitar pedal) wrong, and their raucous guitar-drums dynamic is thrilling. A genuinely brilliant debut from a brilliant - and massively promising - band.

Kathryn Joseph: Bones You Have Thrown Me And Blood I've Spilled (Hits The Fan)

If any album deserves to be on this year's SAY Award shortlist, it is this. The devastating debut LP from Aberdeen singer-songwriter Kathryn Joseph is deceptively fragile - the sparse piano; the sepia-jazz vocals; the broken and wounded and bloodied words - but make no

mistake, it will knock you for six. From hair-raising lullaby The Crow through enigmatic aria The Why, What Baby? through soaring torch-song The Bird, Joseph's bruised and exquisite collection of visceral hymns and earthly sermons is a vital and welcome - and truly original - addition to the Scottish pop canon.

Paolo Nutini: Caustic Love (Atlantic)

Following in the DM-clad footsteps of Twin Atlantic, The Twilight Sad and Biffy Clyro, Paisley soul romeo Paolo Nutini has bagged a place on this year's shortlist thanks to the public vote, which ran for 72 hours from Sunday night. Hailed as a return to form for the swaggering blues-pop libertine, Caustic Love, his third long-player, is an impressive collection of blues-funk wigouts and soul-pop ballads that saw Nutini variously compared to Van Morrison, Rod Stewart, Frankie Miller and Joe Cocker.

PAWS: Youth Culture Forever (Fat Cat)

Longlisted for their riotous debut, Cokefloat in 2013, noise-pop trio PAWS returned with an even fiercer follow-up that blew the roof off misled accusations that their music was lo-fi or - even worse - "slacker-rock". (Anyone who's witnessed their incendiary, crowd-invading live shows will appreciate that the band are as hard-working, and focused, as they are raucous). Self-produced and recorded in a New York backwoods studio, Youth Culture Forever is suitably claustrophobic, dark and sprawling - its fired-up punk-pop dappled with glockenspiels and alt-rock anthems and an 11-minute post-rock epic, War Cry, which deserves an award in itself.

SLAM: Reverse Proceed (Soma)

They released Daft Punk's early records, produced a 90s rave classic in Positive Education, and they're the tireless dance-floor insurgents behind Glasgow's electronic powerhouse, Soma. They are subterranean trailblazers Orde Meikle and Stuart McMillan, and they also operate as tech house DJs and producers SLAM. Reverse Proceed is the duo's first long-player since 2007's Human Response, and it's been widely hailed as one of their greatest releases to date. Reverse Proceed sees SLAM helm a heady, spaced-out trip through ambient dreamscapes, spiralling electronica, acid-fired funk and interplanetary tech-house. Strap in.

Young Fathers: DEAD (Big Dada)

Could Edinburgh's funk-pop livewires Young Fathers be the first band to score the SAY Award double? On the evidence of DEAD, it's not out of the question. The Liberian/Nigerian/Scottish trio picked up last year's SAY Award for Tape Two, while DEAD has already - deservedly - scooped the Mercury Prize. The album's psychedelic, original clash of brooding electro, leftfield pop, falsetto soul and experimental hip-hop is mind-melding and endlessly thrilling, and if the SAY Award exists to spotlight our most exciting - and far-reaching - musical talent, then it's only fitting that this shortlist stars the ingenious Young Fathers.

For more on the shortlisted albums, go online to www.sayaward.com