Yesterday, we revealed the first installment (picks 50-21) of our fifth annual Critics Poll. Today, it’s the top 20 Australian albums of the year – and for the first time ever, well, you’ll see...

20. Scott & Charlene's Wedding
Para Visa Social Club (independent)
“It’s sludgy and hypnotic and true; an undisguised catalogue of the licks we take in our youth.”

19. Washington
I Believe You Liar (Universal)
“A batch of intelligent songs that don’t kowtow to cliche or LCD lyricism, but are still wholly accessible and consistently exciting.”

18. Ancients
The Ancients 2 (Sensory Projects)
“The beauty of The Ancients is how a simple rock ensemble can bring these foreign or hallucinatory images to life, to inflate them with a sense of space and location, to make them fleetingly real.”

17. kyü
kyü (Popfrenzy)
“kyü have crafted an emotionally charged, immensely fulfilling debut that is nevertheless stunning in its fragility and exquisite in its attention to detail.”

16. John Steel Singers
Tangalooma (Dew Process)
“‘Tangalooma’, their debut album a few years in the making, is cheerful: optimistic but not cloyingly so, with songs that tickle and tease but stay just a whisker away from the XTC/Blue Nile trap of being too self-aware.”

15. Circle Pit
Bruise Constellation (Timberyard/Siltbreeze)
“There’s absolutely nothing controversial about 'Bruise Constellation'. This is an album with swagger, confidence and deadbeat rock tropes.”

14. Love Connection
Love Connection (Sensory Projects)
“Organic synths, infectious drum patterns, self-recorded fuzz and guitars ranging from sparse to psychedelic are worked into a satisfying continuity; like coasting along one big rainbow.”

13. Super Wild Horses
Fifteen (Aarght! Records/Shock)
“‘Fifteen’ stands as a superior example of what can be achieved with limited means, but a great ear.”

12. Pikelet
Stem (Chapter Music/Love & Mercy)
“The palette of Pikelet is so wide and expressive, and it’s the thing that makes listening to the entirety of Stem such a joy.”

11. Dan Kelly
Dan Kelly’s Dream (Shock)
“A wordy ramble of a pop record that piles on milky embellishment and finds a singalong chorus in a young Bindi Irwin. At least on par with his masterful second record, this one might be even better.”

The Top 10

10. Sally Seltmann
Heart That's Pounding (Shock)

If ‘Dream About Changing’ didn’t tip you off, this is a record about transformation. Specifically, the kind brought about by sheer will. Free of the New Buffalo name, Sally Seltmann finds the most universal pop of her career in the most personal songs: great waves of voices and instruments flutter past as she addresses her wallflower neuroses under an outsized magnifying glass. And beyond obvious anthems like ‘On The Borderline’ and ‘Harmony To My Heartbeat’, the trembling build of the title track and ‘Don’t Dream It’s Over’ licks of ‘The Truth’ sneak up on you in the best possible way. – Doug Wallen

9. You Am I
You Am I (Other Tongues)

Recorded over "a couple of days" and driven by a mutual desire to impress each other, You Am I's ninth album is an enduring delight – and it’s largely because the band sounds so at ease. Their role as forerunners of contemporary Australian rock music has long since been assured, and it's telling they've no one to impress now but themselves. In ‘Shuck’, the album’s lead single, Tim Rogers sings of a desire to shuck "the past, my poise, the background noise", and it's this insular approach - four musicians in a room, banging it out, fuck everyone else - which has certified the album as a true classic. It's a genuine anomaly for a band's ninth record to rate among their best work, but You Am I once again remind us just how vital their contribution to Australian music has been, still is, and will continue to be. – Andrew McMillen

8. ZOND
ZOND (R.I.P Society Records)

Over the past couple years, Melbourne quartet ZOND have established a formidable reputation for their brain-crushingly intense live shows, which straddle the fine line between sonic bliss and chaotic dissolution. Like the slow-motion explosion of the modernist desert mansion in Antonioni's counter-culture classic Zabriskie Point, ZOND find beauty in the destruction of human folly and vanity, and on their debut album they manage to condense the grandeur of cosmic forces into one singular artefact. Such a distillation can't help but be a volatile and cataclysmic affair. Guitars fairly explode from the speakers, while the rhythm section sounds like collapsing galaxies. Disembodied male and female vocals ghost through the void of space, but these aren't psychedelic hippies - the mood is as bleak, cold and inhuman as the universe itself. This is an album like nothing else released this year, or any other year. It exists separately from contemporary trends, both locally and internationally, but because of this it has the potential to still astound and fascinate many years from now. – René Schaefer

7. Richard In Your Mind
My Volcano (Rice Is Nice)

The idea of psychedelic music has never meant less than it does right now. And yet that’s hardly deterred Sydney’s Richard In Your Mind from singing about lightning eyes, cloud mountains, and opalescent moon mantras. Out-Becking Odelay-era Beck, the band pile unruly dream imagery over slapdash folk, ruptured electronics, and caramel-apple pop. It’s both homespun and transporting, a magic carpet ride secured with a gold coin donation. Still, there’s a songwriting core that’s firmer than in most bands, whether it yields escapist ballads or freewheeling freak-outs. And it all comes together just as well live – maybe even better. – Doug Wallen

6. Gareth Liddiard
Strange Tourist (Shock)

If there were any doubts about its composition, the liner notes to Strange Tourist make it abundantly clear: Gareth Liddiard is credited with “play”, producer/engineer Burke Reid gets “record”. There are no bells and whistles on *Strange Tourist – none of the usual accoutrements that typically colour a debut solo disc – and that’s kinda the point. Everything (or really nothing at all) seems extraneous to the words and how they’re phrased. Whether he’s writing about the disgruntled understudy of a wirewalker (‘Blondin Makes An Omelette’) or a suburban radical loosely based on ex-Guantanamo detainee David Hicks (‘The Radicalisation of D’), Liddiard is pointed, current and direct. He’s a masterful storyteller, working in a pure folk idiom: stories elevated above their musical accompaniment; songs running for as long as it takes to tell a tale (sometimes 16 minutes, sometimes less). Accordingly, Strange Tourist is well on its way to becoming an Australian classic. Indeed, how many other records released in 2010 have yielded 20,000-word online novellas? – Darren Levin

5. My Disco
Little Joy (Shock)

This Melbourne trio have defined themselves through minimalism, repetition and unrelenting force. On Little Joy, they've amplified all of the above to craft their finest set yet. "It was the longest we have ever spent time-wise on a record," guitarist Ben Andrews told M+N, "and I think it really shows with the finished product”. He’s not wrong. Every sustained guitar sound, every metronomic drum part, every chanted lyric is calculated to precision, yet none of the inherent, confronting bleakness and brutality of their music has been lost (despite their decision to stick Scott Horscroft - best known for his work with The Presets and Silverchair - behind the mixing desk). My Disco adhere to the old-school aesthetic of album-as-document; as a result, cherry-picking individual tracks from Little Joy doesn't really work: its potency is derived from the mood they conjure and sustain. From Andrews' first jarring chord ('Turn') to the record's elegant, all-inclusive conclusion ('A Turreted Berg'), My Disco have bettered themselves in every way, and the outcome is nothing short of joyous. – Andrew McMillen

4. Eddy Current Suppression Ring
Rush To Relax (Shock)

Although largely absent from the stage this year, ECSR still made their presence felt strongly with the release of their third album, the follow-up to the Australian Music Prize-winning Primary Colours. Much was made/too much was made of the brevity of the recording process – it took them an evening to bash it out in a Melbourne rehearsal studio –perhaps at a cost of better analysis? Despite the often heard “too simple” criticism, their albums stand in a clear sequence of growth. Boisterous and thoughtful – often at the same time – Rush To Relax landed them on the counters of JB Hi-fi stores across the country, and scored a healthy 7.5 on Pitchfork, for those who care about such things. Regardless, it bolstered and cemented their reputation across the board. The future is there for the taking – if they want it. – Trevor Block

3. Otouto
Pip (Two Bright Lakes)

With songs that piece together like some self-solving jigsaw, Otouto's debut is like a grandfather clock with all it's mechanics exposed. Keeping a beat isn't enough for this Melbourne three-piece, nor is traditionally confessional songwriting, nor is a handful of common rock instruments. You could shelve Otouto as one of those ubiquitous and cloyingly whimsical kitchen sink pop bands from Canada that play Laneway or Golden Plains once and then are forgotten, but there's something a bit classier about Pip. Each song sounds like it was constructed using ladders and scaffolding, like every beat needed to be precisely placed and then bolted in. Time tends to look a tad kinder on bands with a tiny modicum of something new to offer, so with any luck Otouto will endure longer than most of the other bands on this higher end of the list. – Shaun Prescott

2. Parades
Foreign Tapes (Dot Dash/Remote Control)

This is like a dream. Where did it come from? Aching, clamouring, soaring, and above all wildly ambitious, Sydney's Parades dropped the easily most surprising and arguably strongest debut of 2010. Like a kaleidoscope projected widescreen in a darkened theatre, this album is unambiguously joyous and beautiful, but glitters with an enigmatic magic all of it's own. Foreign Tapes is destined to take its place among the greats of Australian underground pop. – Lawson Fletcher

1. Short Stack
This Is Bat Country (Universal/Sunday Morning Records)

1. Tame Impala
Innerspeaker (Modular)

Following Wolfmother's success in recent years, Tame Impala's premise was never going to be particularly risky. By gazing into the past and mining the annals of psychedelic rock, this Perth act – a quartet when playing live – produced a debut full-length characterised by spaced-out guitars, lyrics of social dissociation, and complementary, distant vocals.

Led by singer/guitarist/conductor/producer Kevin Parker, Innerspeaker is very nearly a solo album - he plays the vast majority of the instruments - but upon hearing the finished product, you wouldn't pick it. His ear for song dynamics is remarkable, and at no point does it sound like anything other than a full band jamming in a smoke-filled room. The cover art requires a double take to process, but the music doesn't: Parker's production is immaculate, and his songwriting accessible. Ultimately, Innerspeaker struck a chord this year not because of the human fascination with revisiting sounds of the past, but because Tame Impala threw themselves so entirely into ensuring a high quality experience. "It’s all we really do at home, think about music or record music in some way or another," Kevin Parker told M+Nearlier this year. Long may they continue. – Andrew McMillen

CRITICS POLL PT 1: 50-21.

TOMORROW: We reveal our top tracks of 2010.

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Compiled from the votes of: Dom Alessio, Jodi Biddle, Trevor Block, A.H Cayley, Patrick Emery, Lawson Fletcher, Babette Gladney, Dave Graney, J.P Hammond, Andrew Hazel, Kate Hennessy, Chris Johnston, Darren Levin, Craig Mathieson, Andrew McMillen, Shaun Prescott, Andrew Ramadge, Ian Rogers, René Schaefer, Tim Scott and Doug Wallen.