The J Awards has been loud and proud about Australian music for 20 years

Every November, triple j celebrates Ausmusic Month, commemorating the best and brightest in homegrown music talent.

The centrepiece? The J Awards, a tradition that celebrates its 20th anniversary in 2025.

Similar to station staples like the Hottest 100, Like A Version and One Night Stand, the J Awards is a way for triple j and its sister networks — triple j Unearthed and Double J — to honour the sheer excellence blossoming in our backyard each year.

This year's awards — taking place on Wednesday — is a particularly special milestone, marking two decades of handing out trophies and coinciding with triple j's 50th birthday.

To mark the occasion, we're taking a trip back down Ausmusic memory lane.

How did the J Awards start?

To commemorate triple j's 30th birthday, the station launched a new annual prize: The J Award.

Initially, it was a single category, Australian Album of the Year, designed — as it does to this day — to celebrate an outstanding record for "its creativity, musicianship, contribution to Australian music, and audience impact."

There were 15 nominees in that first year, reflecting a diverse range of genres, sounds, and scenes from around the nation.

Contenders included the solo debut from Powderfinger frontman Bernard Fanning, albums from singer-songwriters Ben Lee, Clare Bowditch and Lior, as well as Aussie hip hop acts Downsyde and The Herd.

Heavy rock trio Cog and revered noise rock band The Drones were also in the mix, alongside releases from Architecture In Helsinki, The Beautiful Girls, Faker, Pivot, and WA bands The Panics and Gyroscope.

However, the victor ended up being Sydney-bred rockers Wolfmother with their self-titled debut album, whose woolly, galloping riffs, mystical lyricism and organ-tinged progressive rock harkened back to genre titans like Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath.

Led by singer-guitarist Andrew Stockdale, Wolfmother stood apart not only from indie-electro favourites and Modular label-mates The Presets and Cut Copy, but also the rootsy surf rock and homegrown hip hop that was trending around Australia.

"Thanks to triple j for asking for our demo a year-and-a-half ago when we'd played one show at Vic On The Park on a Sunday night," Stockdale told the crowd assembled for the inaugural 2005 J Award ceremony, hosted and broadcast from Sydney's storied Annandale Hotel.

Wolfmother's debut swiftly made them a success at home and abroad, achieving Gold status in the UK, Germany, Canada and the US. In 2006, the band's burly single Woman won the Grammy award for Best Hard Rock Performance, the first Australian Grammy victory in any category since Men At Work in 1984.

The album also won the group three ARIA Awards (Breakthrough Artist, Best Rock Album, Best Group), while six songs charted in triple j's Hottest 100 of 2005 — establishing a record for most songs in a single countdown that lasted almost 20 years.

Where are they now? Wolfmother has struggled to reach the same stratospheric heights since, but Stockdale continues to tour and release albums, including the group's sixth, Rock Out, in late 2021.

The J Awards expand

Hilltop Hoods won the award in 2006 with fourth album The Hard Road, and a second category was added in 2007: the triple j Unearthed Artist of the Year award.

Created to tie in with the online platform and digital radio station, the Unearthed J Award has featured many names who would go on to establish impactful careers.

Among them is Boy & Bear (winners in 2010), Townsville folk collective The Middle East (2009), The Rubens (in 2012, who'd go on to top the Hottest 100), and Meg Mac (2014).

Beloved Brisbane band Ball Park Music, who are currently supporting Oasis on their reunion tour, were named Unearthed Artist of the Year back in 2011. 

Their debut album Happiness and Surrounding Suburbs also earned a nod in the album category, giving them the distinction of being the first act in J Awards history with a double nomination. 

First Nations talent like Miss Kaninna, King Stingray and JK-47 win the Unearthed category in recent years, along with Kenyan-Australian artist Elsy Wameyo and Melbourne-based producer and rapper, Lithe.

The very first Unearthed Artist of the Year winner, in 2007, was Young + Restless, beating out nominees Cuthbert and the Nightwalkers, Illzilla, Institut Polaire, and Leroy Lee.

Hailing from Canberra and sporting the angular guitars and club-friendly disco pulse redolent of many late '00s indie acts, Young + Restless won an Unearthed competition to play Homebake festival in 2006 and are best remembered for their singles Police Police and Satan.

Where are they now? Following the release of their debut album in 2007, the band broke up but high school friends, frontwoman Karina Utomo and guitarist Ash Pegram, went on to form hard rock and metal group High Tension in 2012.

Utomo would also front black metal trio Kilat and collaborative project Rinuwat, drawing on her Indonesian heritage and, with the latter, traditional Southeast Asian instrumentation.

Video (did not) kill the radio star

The 2008 J Awards saw club-honed Sydney duo The Presets win Australian Album of the Year with their second album, Apocalypso, while Brisbane six-piece John Steel Singers picked up the Unearthed J Award.

That same year also birthed a new category, Australian Music Video of the Year — a gong that has since been co-presented and evaluated alongside ABC TV's long running late night program, rage.

Notable music video winners over the years include wig-wearing pop sensation Sia with 2014's Chandelier, Client Liaison’s 2017 clip A Foreign Affair featuring Tina Arena, Korean-Australian rap group 1300's 2022 video for Oldboy, and Clubfeet for Everything You Wanted in 2013, which caused a stir when One Direction were accused of copying the clip.

The inaugural 2008 winner, besting videos from The Presets, Angus & Julia Stone, TZU and Josh Pyke, was The Herd's 2020, a critique on Australia's involvement with North America's War On Terror.

Directed by Mike Daly, the clip features members of The Herd — including Elefant Traks co-founder Urthboy — digitally integrated into newspaper print headlines and articles.

Where are they now? Pioneering label Elefant Traks is, sadly, no more, but The Herd are still going strong. In fact, they're heading on tour in February to mark the 20th anniversary of their album The Sun Never Sets.

Significant Accolades

Sarah Blasko became the first female solo artist to taste J Awards glory in 2009, with her third studio album As Day Follows Night, while Washington achieved the same feat the following year in the Australian Music Video category (for Sunday Best, directed by Mairi Cameron and Stephen Lance).

In 2010, the Australian Album of the Year went to InnerSpeaker, the debut from Tame Impala, on which West Australian polymath Kevin Parker lifted from the playbooks of late 1960s and 1970s rock and blues and fused it with psychedelic, homespun textures.

The globally renowned follow-up, 2012's Lonerism, suffused more pop into his kaleidoscopic production. It made Tame Impala the first, and to this day only, artist to have taken out the Australian Album of the Year J Award more than once. Every single one of Tame Impala's subsequent albums has been nominated, including this year's Deadbeat.

A.B. Original, the rap power couple of Briggs and Trials, became the first Indigenous artist to win a J Award, with their 2017 award-hoovering debut Reclaim Australia.

Gotye scored 2011's marquee J Award with his album Making Mirrors, featuring worldwide hit Somebody That I Used To Know. Meanwhile, super producer Flume's self-titled debut scored the Australian Album of the Year in 2013.

Both instances saw triple j getting ahead of the awards season both locally and internationally, awarding Gotye and Flume before the ARIAs and Grammys did.

Where are they now? After his global success, Gotye, or Wally de Backer to his folks, stepped back from the spotlight to focus on other projects. Namely, launching independent record label Spirit Level with bandmate and former Double J presenter Tim Shiel and embarking on preservation projects for electronic music pioneer Jean-Jacques Perrey and backing the Melbourne Electronic Sound Studio (MESS).

He continues to produce and release music, often with his first band The Basics, but at a much more grassroots scale. Oh, and Kimbra is still somebody that he knows.

A new station, a new award

In 2014, following the launch of Double J, which aimed at an older listening demographic, the Double J Australian Artist of the Year category joined the J Awards festivities.

Established to celebrate an Australian artist of group with a stand-out year through the release of new music, live performances, or making an impact on Australian arts and culture, the inaugural winner was Mia Dyson.

Her more mature songwriting and assured roots-rock sound suited an audience perhaps no longer drawn to the triple j sound, epitomised by Chet Faker and his blue-eyed soultronica on Built On Glass, an album that not only took out the 2014 Australian Album of the Year but dominated the Hottest 100 and ARIA Awards.

Other Double J Hall of Famers include rock icons Midnight Oil and Tim Rogers; late, great Indigenous inspirations Archie Roach and Gurrumul; singer-songwriters Jen Cloher and Missy Higgins.

In 2016, the wildly prolific King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard became the first act to score multiple J Award wins, taking out Double J Australian Artist of the Year and Australian Music Video of the Year (for People-Vultures, directed by Danny Cohen and Jason Galea).

A few years later, dynamic Zambian-Australian rapper Sampa The Great mirrored that milestone, winning the 2019 Double J Australian Artist of the Year and Australian Music Video of the Year (Final Form directed by Sanjay De Silva).

Speaking of double dippers, Claudia Sangiorgi Dalimore is the only director to win the music video J Award twice. First, helming the 2018 clip for Mo'Ju's Native Tongue, and again last year, for Emily Wurramara's Lordy Lordy featuring Tasman Keith.

Done Good and Live Act

In 2019, the J Awards expanded to five categories with the addition of the Done Good Award, designed to recognise achievements outside of traditional music formats.

That included those who might not necessarily be musos themselves, with the initial round of nominees including Paralympian Dylan Alcott, the National Indigenous Music Awards, behind-the-scenes hit-maker Sarah Aarons, and *checks notes* Harry 'the Poo Roadie' for Boy & Bear.

The first Done Good Award went to Heidi Lenffer, recognising her work fronting environmental organisation FEAT.

The category ran for four years, awarding philanthropy work by Kobie Dee, Jaguar Jonze's fearlessness combatting sexual misconduct in the music industry, and COVID-era concert series Isol-Aid.

In 2023, Done Good was retired for the Australian Live Act of the Year award, celebrating the mind-blowing shows and tours that fans couldn't stop talking about.

Angie McMahon took out the gong last year, while previous J Award victor Genesis Owusu was named the live music winner in its first year. 

That made the Ghanian-born, Canberra-based dynamo the artist with the most J Awards to date, following his 2021 sweep of the Australian Album of the Year (for his debut Smiling With No Teeth) and Australian Music Video of the Year (The Other Black Dog directed by Riley Blakeway).

Where are they now? Heidi Lenffercontinues to work with FEAT. on a range of eco-minded campaigns and initiatives to reduce live music’s carbon footprint. She also found time to reunite with the members (including her brother) of Sydney band Cloud Control for a 15th anniversary tour of their J Award-nominated debut album, Bliss Release.

With homegrown music struggling on the ARIA charts, along with Australian festivals and live music venues suffering complex changes, the simple act of recognising the brilliant things happening here at home, honouring and cultivating it, is always welcome.

The 2025 J Awards happens on triple j, Double J, and triple j Unearthed on Wednesday, 12 November. Get all the info here.