The pop music landscape has been awash in superstar juggernauts (Taylor Swift, Beyoncé), headline-grabbing beefs (Drake vs. Kendrick Lamar, et. al.) and a freshly minted gaggle of hit-makers such as Sabrina Carpenter, Chappell Roan, Charli XCX and Shaboozey. Appropriately enough, each of the aforementioned artists — except Drake, who stopped submitting his music for Grammy consideration a while back — received loads of nominations when next year’s Grammy Awards contenders were announced Friday.
That isn’t to say that everything played out exactly as expected. And there are plenty of subplots and storylines to unpack as we await the Grammys telecast on Feb. 2, 2025:
1. It’s been a massive year for women in pop. Remember back in 2018, when Neil Portnow, then head of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, said that women needed to “step up” after that year’s Grammys were overwhelmingly won by men? Yeah, he 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 headlined by women, though several share billing with male counterparts. And, while the best new artist field is split 50-50, the overwhelming frontrunners (Roan and Carpenter) are both women.
2. As expected, Beyoncé leads the field. The two most heavily nominated musicians of all time share a household: Until Friday, Beyoncé and Jay-Z were tied with 88 nominations apiece, while Beyoncé holds the all-time record for Grammy wins with 32. Now, Queen Bey has a stunning 99 nominations to her name, as Cowboy Carter and an assortment of its songs have racked up a field-leading 11 nods. It helps that Cowboy Carter sprawls across multiple genres and brings in loads of collaborators, which made her eligible in more categories than, say, Chappell Roan, who lacks eligible collaborations and didn’t submit in any genres outside pop.
3. Chappell Roan and Sabrina Carpenter join a select group. The Grammys have four general, cross-genre categories, which have collectively come to be known 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 — most recently Olivia Rodrigo three years ago. (FINNEAS kinda did it that year, too, but it didn’t count; he was nominated for best new artist as a solo act, but his other nominations in that year’s Big Four were headlined by his sister, Billie Eilish.) In the latest round of nominations, Roan and Carpenter are up for each of The Big Four; if either happens to sweep, she’ll become only the third artist ever to do so, after Christopher Cross in 1981 and Eilish in 2020.
4. Wait, Sabrina Carpenter — whose Short n’ Sweet is her sixth album — is up for best new artist? Yeah, the category of best new artist could really use a rebrand, perhaps to something like “best breakthrough artist,” because newness is very much in the eye of the beholder here. But Carpenter broke through in a big way in 2024, so she was eligible. (The rules are more byzantine than that, but that’s the gist of it.) Same goes for her fellow nominee Khruangbin, which has been cranking out albums since 2015, but fairly recently became popular enough to fill stadiums.
5. Speaking of confusing categories… Grammy viewers have long been baffled by the difference between record and song of the year. As it turns out, so are Grammy voters, who heard Shaboozey’s chart-topping “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” and nominated it for song of the year, but not 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: the production, the performance, the vibe. “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” is terrific; it’s great fun. But it’s more of a “record of the year” kind of song than a “song of the year” kind of song.
6. The record of the year field does include one very old song. “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” famously interpolates J-Kwon’s 2004 hit “Tipsy,” but the Recording Academy went even further back for the awards’ premier 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 came out with a huge surge of fanfare, though it’s more curiosity than classic; still, it’s one of eight songs nominated for record of the year in 2025. If it wins, it’ll be the first time a Beatles song won a Grammy since all the way back in… February 2024, when a remastered reissue of 1966’s “I’m Only Sleeping” won best music video.
7. The album of the year field features two extreme dark horses. Six of the eight nominees for album of the year were pretty much mortal locks: Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter, Sabrina Carpenter’s Short n’ Sweet, Charli xcx’s Brat, Billie Eilish’s HIT ME HARD AND SOFT, Chappell Roan’s The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess and Taylor Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department. Those six albums dominated 2024 — not only based on sales and streaming, but also in terms of their overall cultural footprint. The next two? Not so much.
One is Jacob Collier’s Djesse Vol. 4, which marks Collier’s first album of the year nomination since the one he got for, um, Djesse Vol. 3. With credit to NPR Music editor Jacob Ganz, who referred to this nomination as “filling the Jon Batiste jazz-but-with-smiling spot,” the nod to Collier feels strange coming from such a crowded field of powerhouse contenders. Still, it’s not as unexpected as the nomination for André 3000’s New Blue Sun — which is, remember, an epic-length collection of flute-forward instrumental odysseys. OutKast was a Grammy staple, sure, and lots of people were curious about André’s first record in 17 years. But… album of the year? Really?
8. Of course, there were snubs. Getting left out of a field of five, six or eight nominees isn’t technically a “snub” — it’s just math, really — but there were still surprises among this year’s Grammy omissions. Dua Lipa’s Radical Optimism didn’t perform as well as its predecessor, and the field of women in pop was unusually crowded and strong this year, but her lack of nominations feels notable. (See also: Ariana Grande, who did pick up three nominations but was shut out of The Big Four.) Fans might be surprised to see Zach Bryan absent from the field, given how well his records performed in 2024, but he refused to submit any of his music for consideration, so he’s out. The biggest surprise of all may be Vampire Weekend, whose Only God Was Above Us was considered a lock to be nominated in several categories — possibly even album of the year — but got left out of all of them.
9. Speaking of which, Ye’s Grammy star may finally be fading. The artist formerly known as Kanye West has been nominated for 75 Grammys, and won 24 of them. Even a long string of controversies failed to dampen the Grammys’ enthusiasm for him, given that Donda was nominated for album of the year just three years ago. But Ye’s latest album, the Ty Dolla $ign collaboration Vultures 2, yielded just one nomination, for best rap song (“Carnival”). Ye is either matched or exceeded by an impressive assortment of women, 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, ever overlook Taylor Swift. Wait, did you just read 12 paragraphs and only one of them mentioned Taylor Swift? Is that even legal? Really, how dare you? Swift picked up six more nominations this year, bringing her total to 58 overall, with 24 wins — including four album of the year gramophones. She’s picked up her seventh nomination for album of the year (for The Tortured Poets Department), is in the running for song and record of the year (for “Fortnight”) and… hey, where are you going?
