The Grammy nominations for 2025 are in! And there are a lot of takeaways we can grasp from them. Overall, it's a huge year for women in pop, with artists such as Beyoncé, Taylor Swift, Sabrina Carpenter, Chappell Roan, Charli XCX and Billie Eilish making headlines this awards season. But there are also other hitmakers leading the pack - such as Kendrick Lamar, Shaboozey, Jacob Collier, André 3000...and even the Beatles.
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. While the best new artist field is split 50-50, the overwhelming frontrunners (Chappell Roan and Sabrina Carpenter) are both women.
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But in terms of the woman who is on top (or should we say, "Love on Top") this year, Beyoncé has the most nominations for the 2025 GRAMMYs, with 11 nods. This now makes her the most-nominated artist in GRAMMYs history. According to NPR, the two most heavily nominated musicians of all time share a household; until Friday (November 8), 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 recognition.
Taylor Swift also broke a GRAMMYs record this year. Since The Tortured Poets Department is nominated for Album of the Year, she now becomes the first woman to be nominated for Album of the Year at the GRAMMYs seven times. Overall, Swift picked up six more nominations this year, bringing her career total to 58, with 24 wins — including four Album of the Year gramophones.
Swift and Beyoncé have often been GRAMMY darlings, but they do have some stiff competition this year with the meteoric rise of Sabrina Carpenter and Chappell Roan. The two pop stars join a select group this awards season. 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. 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 Billie Eilish in 2020.
Speaking of Best New Artist - there is some controversy with Carpenter being nominated for the category this year, as Short n' Sweet is her sixth studio album to date. (Perhaps the category needs a rebrand to "Best Breakthrough Artist?") But she's not the only nominee in the category to bend the rules a bit. Her fellow nominee Khruangbin - a psychedelic rock trio that has been cranking out albums since 2015 - also got a nod this year. Additionally, Carpenter is aware of the oddity in her nomination. In a reaction video the pop star posted to social media, the "Please Please Please" singer joked about the recognition.
“I don’t know how that’s possible. I’m the best old artist. S—, I’ve been here,” Carpenter said while watching the nomination broadcast on her tour bus.
There's also some surprising nominations for Record of the Year and Song of the Year. For context: Song of the Year solely praises composition of a song, while Record of the Year is an award for the complete package - the production, the performance, and the rollout.
For Song of the Year, Shaboozey's hit "A Bar Song (Tipsy)" notably got a nod. However, some critics believe it belonged more in the Record of the Year category for 2025. And as for Record of the Year, a very old song received a nod this year. 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 in 2024. But if it wins Record of the Year in 2025, it actually won't be a huge milestone achievement for the legendary British band. The Beatles recently won a GRAMMY for one of their songs in February 2024, when a remastered reissue of 1966’s “I’m Only Sleeping” won Best Music Video.
Finally, we get to Album of the Year. This is a category where the pop girlies really shine. Unsurprisingly, 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 all got locked in this year. It makes sense, given all of the albums' sales, streaming data, and cultural footprints. But there are two dark horses in the category: Jacob Collier’s Djesse Vol. 4 and André 3000’s experimental flute album, New Blue Sun. For Collier, the nod is his first Album of the Year nod since he got one for Djesse Vol. 3, which came out back in 2020. André 3000’s nod shows the Recording Academy still has a lot of love for OutKast; the group was a GRAMMY staple back in the day, and lots of people were curious about André’s first record in 17 years.
As for snubs, there were a few this year. It seems as if both Ariana Grande and Dua Lipa were shut out of the pop girl craze. While Grande did pick up three nominations this year with Eternal Sunshine, fans are upset she was shut out of the Big Four. And as for Dua Lipa - although her singles charted high in 2024, she was completely wiped off the GRAMMYs map, with zero nominations this year.
Other surprising snubs include Zach Bryan and Vampire Weekend. Bryan's records performed very well in 2024, but he refused to submit any of his music for consideration. Vampire Weekend's Only God Was Above Us was expected to be a lock in several categories — possibly even album of the year. However, it got left out of all of them and received zero nods.
The 67th GRAMMY Awards will broadcast live from the Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles on February 2, 2025. It will be available to watch on the CBS Television Network and will stream live and on demand via Paramount+.
See all the Big Four nominees below and check out the full list of GRAMMY nominations here.
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Article Image: Close-up shots of four female pop stars. Sabrina Carpenter at the 2024 MTV VMAs red carpet, Chappell Roan at the 2024 MTV VMAs red carpet, Charli XCX at the 13th Annual LACMA Art + Film Gala, Billie Eilish at the 2024 Film Independent Spirit Awards. (imagepressagency, imagepressagency, imagepressagency and Jean_Nelson via DepositPhotos.)
