Sabrina Carpenter, seen here at Coachella earlier this year, was nominated in each of the four major categories at the 2025 Grammy Awards: album, song and record of the year, as well as best new artist. Fraser Harrison/Getty Images North America hide caption
Toggle caption Fraser Harrison/Getty Images North America
The pop music scene was filled with juggernaut stars (Taylor Swift, Beyoncé), headline-grabbing beefs (Drake vs. Kendrick Lamar, et al) and a new crop of hitmakers like Sabrina Carpenter, Chappelle Rowan, Charli XCX and Chabuzzie. Fittingly enough, each of the aforementioned artists — with the exception of Drake, who stopped submitting his music for Grammy consideration a while ago — received a slew of nominations when the contenders for next year’s Grammy Awards were announced on Friday.
This does not mean that everything went exactly as expected. And there are plenty of subplots and stories to uncover as we wait for the Grammy Awards to air on February 2, 2025:
1. It’s been a huge year for women in pop music. Remember in 2018, when Neil Portnow, president of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, said women needed to “step up” after men overwhelmingly won the Grammy Awards that year? Yes it sucked. This year, women dominate the major categories: In Record of the Year, Song of the Year, and Album of the Year, six of the eight nominees are led by women, though many share billing with their male counterparts. While the top field of new artists is split 50-50, the two front-runners (Rowan and Carpenter) are both women.
2. As expected, Beyoncé leads the field. The two most-nominated musicians of all time share a family: As of Friday, Beyoncé and Jay-Z were tied with 88 nominations each, while Beyoncé holds the all-time record for Grammy wins with 32. And now, Queen Bey has a staggering 99 nominations. Nominations to her name, such as Cowboy Carter and a variety of her songs, garnered 11 nominations. It helps that Cowboy Carter spans across multiple genres and brings in a large number of collaborators, making her eligible in more categories than, say, Chappelle Rowan, who lacks qualifying collaborations and hasn’t performed in any genre outside of pop.
3. Chappelle Rowan and Sabrina Carpenter join the select group. The Grammy Awards have four general, cross-genre categories, which have come to be known collectively as the Big Four: Album of the Year, Record of the Year, Song of the Year, and Best New Artist. In the history of the awards, only 13 artists have been nominated in all four categories during the same year, the most recent being Olivia Rodrigo three years ago. (FINNEAS did it that year, too, but it didn’t matter; he was nominated for Best New Artist as a solo act, but his other Big Four nominations for that year were headlined by his sister, Billie Eilish.) In the final round of nominations, Rowan and Carpenter are contenders for each of the Big Four; If either happens, she will become the third artist ever to do so, after Christopher Cross in 1981 and Eilish in 2020.
4. Wait, Sabrina Carpenter — whose sixth album, Short n’ Sweet — is up for Best New Artist? Yes, the Best New Artist category could really use a new branding, perhaps for something like “Best New Artist,” because novelty is in the eye of the beholder here. But Carpenter had a breakthrough in 2024, so she was eligible. (The rules are more byzantine than that, but that’s the gist of it.) The same goes for fellow nominee Khroongbin, who has been producing albums since 2015, but has only recently become popular enough to fill stadiums.
5. Speaking of confusing categories… Grammy viewers have long been puzzled by the difference between a recording and song of the year. As it turns out, so were the Grammy voters, who heard Chabuzi’s chart-topping hit “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” and nominated it for song of the year, but not for record of the year. Song of the Year is an award for composition, while Record of the Year is an award for the complete package: production, performance and atmosphere. “The Tipsy Bar Song” is great. It’s great fun. But it’s more of a “record of the year” type of song than a “song of the year” type of song.
6. The year field record includes one very old song. “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” is a popular adaptation of J-Kwon’s 2004 hit song “Tipsy,” but the Recording Academy went further for the awards’ top category. John Lennon wrote and recorded his demo of The Beatles’ “Now and Then” sometime around 1977, but the song wasn’t finished or released until late 2023. Naturally, it went out with a huge wave of fanfare, though it’s more curious than classic; However, it is one of eight songs nominated for Record of the Year in 2025. If it wins, it will mark the first time a Beatles song has won a Grammy since February 2024, when their 1966 hit “I’m Only “Sleeping” won Best Music Video.
7. Album of the Year features two extreme dark horses. Six of the eight nominees for Album of the Year were pretty much deadbeats: Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter, Sabrina Carpenter’s Short n’ Sweet, Brat’s Charli xcx, HIT ME HARD AND SOFT’s Billie Eilish, and Chappelle Rowan’s The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess. Tortured Poets Section by Taylor Swift. These six albums dominated 2024, not only in terms of sales and streaming, but also in terms of their overall cultural imprint. Next? Not much.
One is Jacob Collier’s Djesse Vol. 4, which marks Collier’s first album of the year nomination since the one he received, Djesse Vol. 3. Thanks to NPR music editor Jacob Ganz, who referred to this nomination as “filling Jon Batiste’s jazz shoes but with a smile,” the reference to Collier seems odd coming from such a crowded field of strong contenders. However, it’s not as unexpected as the nomination for André 3000’s New Blue Sun – which is, as you may recall, an epic suite of flute-driven musical odysseys. OutKast was certainly a staple at the Grammys, and many people were curious about Andre’s first record in 17 years. But… album of the year? truly?
8. Of course, there were snubs. Being left out of a group of five, six or eight nominees isn’t technically a “snub” — it’s just a matter of math, in fact — but there are still surprises among this year’s Grammy omissions. Dua Lipa’s “Radical Optimism” didn’t do as well as its predecessor, and the field for women in pop music was unusually crowded and strong this year, but its lack of nominations seems notable. (See also: Ariana Grande, who received three nominations but was left out of The Big Four.) Fans may be surprised to see Zach Bryan absent from the field, given how well his records are performing in 2024, but he declined to submit all of his music for consideration, so he outside. The biggest surprise of all may be Vampire Weekend, whose “Only God Was Over Us” was nominated as a lock in several categories — and perhaps even Album of the Year — but was shut out of all of them.
9. Speaking of which, Ye’s Grammy star may finally be starting to fade. The artist formerly known as Kanye West has been nominated for 75 Grammy Awards, winning 24 of them. Even a long string of controversies failed to dampen Grammy enthusiasm for it, given that Donda had been nominated for Album of the Year just three years earlier. But Ye’s latest album, the collaboration with Ty Dolla $ign Vultures 2, received just one nomination for best rap song (“Carnival”). There’s an impressive array of women to match or surpass Ye, as this year’s rap categories include nominations for Cardi B, Doechii, GloRilla, Beyoncé (joined by Linda Martell), Latto, and Rapsody (with Erykah Badu).
10. Never overlook Taylor Swift. Wait, did I just read 12 paragraphs and only one of them mentioned Taylor Swift? Is this even legal? Really, how dare you? Swift received six more nominations this year, bringing her total to 58, with 24 wins — including four for Gramophone Album of the Year. She’s got her seventh nomination for Album of the Year (for the Tortured Poets section), she’s in the running for Song and Record of the Year (for “Fortnight”) and… Hey, where are you going?
