The Grammys
7 min read
Kendrick Lamar, Lady Gaga and Bad Bunny Lead 2026 Grammy Nominees
Sabrina Carpenter, Leon Thomas, Doechii and Tyler, the Creator will compete in the biggest categories at the awards show in February.
By Ben Sisario
Rap will be front and center at the 68th annual Grammy Awards in February, with Kendrick Lamar, Bad Bunny, Doechii and Tyler, the Creator among the top nominees.
Lady Gaga, Sabrina Carpenter, Billie Eilish and Chappell Roan are also in competition for the most prestigious awards, according to nominations released on Friday by the Recording Academy. But after several cycles of warring pop divas, the biggest story lines on Grammy night may be centered on men.
Lamar, the rap king who took both record and song of the year at the most recent ceremony with his slam-dunk diss track “Not Like Us,” is the year’s top nominee with nine nods, most for his latest album, “GNX.” Lady Gaga has seven and Carpenter, Bad Bunny and Leon Thomas, a singer, songwriter and producer, each have six.
Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, better known as Bad Bunny, is up in all the top all-genre categories for his latest album, “Debí Tirar Más Fotos,” which mingles traditional Puerto Rican styles like plena with his more familiar reggaeton and trap. That raises the possibility of a major spotlight just a week before he is set to make history with the first all-Spanish performance at the Super Bowl halftime show.
The Grammys ceremony will be held on Feb. 1 at Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles. (Taylor Swift’s recent blockbuster “The Life of a Showgirl” was not up for consideration — it was released after the eligibility window for next year’s awards had closed.)
In a rarity, three rap LPs are up for album of the year: “GNX,” Tyler, the Creator’s “Chromakopia” and “Let God Sort Em Out,” the first entry in 16 years by the veteran rap duo Clipse. Whether any of them win is a choice for the academy’s voters, but for a genre that has long fought for recognition from the Grammy establishment, the nominations alone are significant. (Until 2019, the ballot allowed no more than five entries per category.)
In addition to “GNX,” “Let God Sort Em Out,” “Chromakopia” and “Debí Tirar Más Fotos” (“I Should Have Taken More Photos”), the ballot for album of the year includes Lady Gaga (“Mayhem”), Carpenter (“Man’s Best Friend”), Justin Bieber (“Swag”) and Thomas (“Mutt”).
Record and song of the year, the Grammys’ two top trophies for individual tracks, were once seen as very different contests, with separate batches of songs in competition — record of the year recognizes the performance and recording of a single track, while song of the year focuses on the craft of songwriting.
But those categories have been gradually converging, and this year they are almost identical, coalescing on a batch of seven tracks that are nominated for both awards: Carpenter’s “Manchild,” Lady Gaga’s “Abracadabra,” Bad Bunny’s “DtMF,” Eilish’s “Wildflower” and Doechii’s “Anxiety,” along with “Luther” by Lamar with SZA and “Apt.” by Rosé and Bruno Mars.
The record category rounds out its eight-slot ballot with Roan’s “The Subway.” Song of the year adds “Golden” from the hit soundtrack to the Netflix animated film “KPop Demon Hunters.”
Up for best new artist are Alex Warren and Sombr, who have had breakout years on streaming services; Addison Rae, a star social-media influencer who released her debut album this year; and Katseye, a girl-group sextet created in a reality competition series. The category also includes Thomas, who has written hits for artists like Ariana Grande and SZA before breaking out as a solo act; Olivia Dean, an English singer-songwriter with a neo-soul sound; the indie-pop band the Marías; and Lola Young, who bared her insecurities in the viral song “Messy.”
In other key contests, best pop vocal album will pit Bieber’s “Swag,” Lady Gaga’s “Mayhem” and Carpenter’s “Man’s Best Friend” against Miley Cyrus’s “Something Beautiful” and “I’ve Tried Everything but Therapy (Part 2)” by Teddy Swims, a best new artist contestant last year (he lost to Roan).
In best rap album, “GNX,” “Chromakopia” and Clipse’s “Let God Sort Em Out” are up against GloRilla’s “Glorious” and JID’s “God Does Like Ugly.”
This year’s nominations for big rap stars like Lamar and Tyler, the Creator came even as rap has seen a dip in the charts. For two weeks this fall, there were no rap songs among the Top 40 slots of Billboard’s Hot 100 all-genre singles chart for the first time since 1990.
Best rock album, which often holds a spot or two for boomer icons, instead has 1990s and 2000s-era alternative fixtures (Deftones, a reborn Linkin Park), hardcore punk (Turnstile), a pop-punk provocateur (Yungblud) and the pop-rock sister group Haim.
Some controversy surrounds the country field this year. Morgan Wallen, a streaming behemoth who is by far Nashville’s biggest new star, boycotted the Grammys by declining to submit his latest blockbuster, “I’m the Problem” — which logged 12 weeks at No. 1 on the all-genre Billboard 200 album chart — for consideration.
Wallen gave no reason, but with only two previous nominations — as a guest on another artist’s song — he has been conspicuously snubbed. Four years ago, Wallen was caught on video using a racial slur; he was rebuked, and then apologized. But while that episode was intensely covered in the news media, Wallen’s commercial ascent was unabated.
The academy also split the best country album category into two awards: contemporary and traditional. Coming just months after Beyoncé took the prize for “Cowboy Carter” — a release that stoked debate about genre and racial barriers, yet was largely ignored by the Nashville establishment — the move immediately raised eyebrows in the industry.
Harvey Mason Jr., the chief executive of the Recording Academy, was quoted in trade publications saying that the change had been proposed a number of times in the past. “The community of people making country music in all different subgenres,” Mason said, “came to us with a proposal and said they wanted more variety in how their music is honored.”
The traditional country ballot includes the 92-year-old Willie Nelson, along with Margo Price, Charley Crockett, Lukas Nelson and Zach Top. Contemporary has Kelsea Ballerini, Tyler Childers, Eric Church, Miranda Lambert and one notable boundary-crosser: Jelly Roll, the tattooed performer who started off as a rapper.
(Traditional/contemporary splits have long been a fixture of the Grammy ballot, and remain in blues and R&B categories.)
For producer of the year, non-classical, Sounwave, a Lamar collaborator, will compete against Cirkut (Lady Gaga; Rosé and Mars), Dijon (Bieber), Blake Mills (Perfume Genius, Japanese Breakfast) and Dan Auerbach of the Black Keys.
In its fourth year on the ballot, the songwriter of the year, non-classical, category, which was created to recognize nonperforming songwriters, includes two former winners, Amy Allen and Tobias Jesso Jr., along with Edgar Barrera, Jessie Jo Dillon and Laura Veltz.
The ceremony will be broadcast for the last time on CBS, the Recording Academy’s broadcast partner for more than 50 years — and on Paramount+ — before moving to ABC, Hulu and Disney Plus in 2027, as part of a new deal with Disney.
The winners are determined by the 15,000 voting members of the academy, among them performers, producers, engineers and songwriters. Nearly 23,000 entries were submitted for the Grammys’ 95 categories this year, and voters will cast their ballots starting in January.
After two years with an abbreviated eligibility period of 50 weeks, the latest Grammys cover a full year of music, with the academy accepting submissions of recordings that were released from Aug. 31, 2024, to Aug. 30, 2025.
Ben Sisario, a reporter covering music and the music industry, has been writing for The Times for more than 20 years.
