Three Towns band Voldo have been nominated for Scottish Album of the Year 2020 by the SAY Awards.

The group, after a hiatus of 17 years, released their album ‘Sophia’ back in May.

The award is Scottish music’s most prestigious prize and has been awarded each year since its launch in 2012 to the creators of an outstanding Scottish album.

Previous winners of the award include Young Fathers, Auntie Flo, Sacred Paws, Anna Meredith, Kathryn Joseph, RM Hubbert, and Bill Wells and Aidan Moffat.

David Nunn (AKA Nunny) of Voldo said: “It’s all gone a bit mental, we did a one off project about 17 years ago and then recently thought we’d try and do another one and it’s all kind of snowballed from there.

“Towards the end of last week SAY got in touch to say we’d been nominated for Scottish Album of the Year.”

The band released the album during lockdown and made it freely available for the public to download, their motivation was purely artistic, with Nunny saying “we did the album project as a laugh you know, just for own sakes, it was just to see if the fire was still there.”

But since the release the band have been getting international recognition for their album, far exceeding what Nunny envisaged.

“I was quite surprised, at first I saw we were getting tagged on Twitter and thought oh that’s good we’re getting some airplay and then saw that we’d been nominated and thought oh Jesus this is big.”

The band has subsequently rejected two offers of record deals, preferring to do things their own way. Nunny says that they’re not short of collaborators either with plenty of folk lining up to work with the band, currently they’re working with rappers and are looking for members of the public to submit videos of them breakdancing for a music video they’re working on.

The list of nominations will be whittled down to a longlist of 20 before a combination of judges and the public thin that down to 10. The winner is selected by the judges and receives £20,000, with the nine runners-up receiving £1,000 each.

They’ll be competing against some big names such as Gerry Cinnamon, Lewis Capaldi, Mogwai, and Hamish Napier.

The winners will be announced later this year.