I Robot takes the catalogue prize at AIM Awards

A new category for reissues more than two years old put the 1977 album back on the independent stage at the Roundhouse, alongside prizes for Robyn, Jorja Smith and Jalen Ngonda.

The Alan Parsons Project won Best Catalogue Release at the 2026 Independent Music Awards for the Cooking Vinyl reissue of I Robot. The Association for Independent Music held the ceremony on 22 September at London’s Roundhouse, an evening built around independent labels, artists and releases from the UK scene.

The Best Catalogue Release is a new award. It recognises reissues more than two years old and places older catalogues on the same footing as current campaigns. I Robot first appeared in 1977. Nearly five decades on, the Cooking Vinyl edition has carried that record onto the awards stage under an independent banner.

Studio craft and a long catalogue

The Alan Parsons Project were a British rock band active between 1975 and 1990. At the centre were producer, audio engineer, musician and composer Alan Parsons and singer, songwriter and pianist Eric Woolfson. The pair shared writing credits on almost all of the Project’s songs, and Parsons produced or co?produced the recordings throughout. They worked with a changing cast of session musicians and a steadier circle that included guitarist Ian Bairnson, arranger Andrew Powell, bassist and vocalist David Paton, drummer Stuart Elliott, and vocalists Lenny Zakatek and Chris Rainbow.

The debut album, Tales of Mystery and Imagination, arrived in 1976. I Robot followed in 1977, then Pyramid in 1978, Eve in 1979 and The Turn of a Friendly Card in 1980. Those early records fixed the Project’s reputation for meticulous studio craft and conceptual albums. The partnership ran on through the 1980s before the Project came to a close at the turn of the decade. Later catalogue work has kept the name in print through compilations and expanded editions, among them The Essential Alan Parsons Project in 2007 and The Sicilian Defence in 2014. The Cooking Vinyl reissue of I Robot belongs to that afterlife: a return to one of the central albums rather than a fresh studio chapter.

What else the night marked

Robyn won Best Independent Album with Sexistential. Jorja Smith took Best Independent Track for The Way I Love You. Jalen Ngonda was named Independent Breakthrough. Wet Leg were nominated in the Best Release Campaign category for Moisturizer, released on Domino Recording Co.

The spread of results shows the range the awards marked: a contemporary album campaign, a breakthrough artist, a standout track and, in the new catalogue slot, a 1977 progressive landmark still moving through an independent label. For listeners who know the Project through the original run of records, the prize is a reminder that those albums remain objects of active care rather than closed history. For the independent sector, it is a clear signal that reissues and long?running catalogues now sit inside the awards structure itself, not at the margins.

Coverage of the night has not set out acceptance speeches or a longer roll?call of British and Irish pop and rock winners beyond those named. The firm result is the one attached to I Robot. A record that once defined a studio?led strand of British rock has been singled out again, this time under the banner of independent catalogue, with Cooking Vinyl as the label that brought it back into the frame.