Sabrina Carpenter, seen here at Coachella earlier this year, is nominated in each of the four major categories of the 2025 Grammy Awards: album, song and record of the year, plus best new artist.

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Frazer Harrison/Getty Images North America

The pop music landscape is awash with superstars (Taylor Swift, Beyoncé), headlines (Drake vs. Kendrick Lamar, et. al.), and a freshly minted bunch of hitmakers like 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 ago — received a ton of nominations when the contenders for next year’s Grammy Awards were announced Friday.

That doesn’t mean everything went exactly as expected. And there are plenty of subplots and storylines to unpack as we wait for the Grammys broadcast on February 2, 2025:

1. It’s been a great year for women in pop music. Remember back in 2018, when Neil Portnow, then head of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, said women needed to step up after that year’s Grammys were overwhelmingly won by men? Yes, 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, although several share billing with male counterparts. And while the top 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 nominated musicians of all time share a household: Until Friday, Beyoncé and Jay-Z were tied with 88 nominations each, while Beyoncé holds the all-time record for Grammy wins with 32. Now Queen Bey has a whopping 99 nominations. nominations to her name, such as Cowboy Carter and an assortment of his songs have yielded eleven industry-leading nods. It helps that Cowboy Carter spreads across multiple genres and brings in a ton of collaborators, making it eligible in more categories than, say, Chappell Roan, which has no eligible collaborations and hasn’t signed up in genres outside of pop.

3. Chappell Roan and Sabrina Carpenter join a select group. The Grammys have four general, cross-genre categories, which have collectively become 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 thirteen artists have been nominated in all four categories in the same year – most recently Olivia Rodrigo three years ago. (FINNEAS did it that year too, but it didn’t count; he was nominated for best new artist as a solo act, but his other Big Four nominations that year were topped by his sister, Billie Eilish.) In the latter round of nominations, Roan and Carpenter are candidates for each of The Big Four; If either succeeds, she will become only the third artist to ever do so, following Christopher Cross in 1981 and Eilish in 2020.

4. Wait, Sabrina Carpenter – whose Short and sweet is her sixth album – ready for best new artist? Yes, the best new artist category could really use a rebrand, perhaps to something like “best breakthrough artist,” because newness here is very much in the eye of the beholder. But Carpenter had her big break in 2024, so she was eligible. (The rules are more Byzantine than that, but that’s the gist.) The same goes for her fellow nominee Khruangbin, who has been releasing albums since 2015 but quite 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. It turns out that so is Grammy voterswho heard Shaboozey’s hit “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 atmosphere. “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” is great; it’s a lot of fun. But it’s more of a ‘record of the year’ type song than a ‘song of the year’ type song.

6. The year field record contains one terribly old song. “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” is a famous interpolation of J-Kwon’s 2004 hit “Tipsy,” but the Recording Academy went back even further for the first prize category. John Lennon wrote and recorded his demo of The Beatles’ “Now and Then” sometime around 1977, but the song was not finished or released until late 2023. Naturally, it came out to a huge wave of fanfare, although it’s more curiosity than classical; yet it’s one of eight songs nominated for record of the year in 2025. If it wins, it will be the first time a Beatles song has won a Grammy since all the way back in… February 2024, when a remastered re-release of ‘I’m Only Sleeping” won best video clip.

7. The album of the year field contains two extremely dark horses. Six of the eight nominees for album of the year were virtually mortal locks: Beyoncé’s Cowboy CarterSabrina Timmermans Short and sweetCharli xcxs Bratby Billie Eilish HIT ME HARD AND SOFTChappell Roans The rise and fall of a Midwestern princess and Taylor Swift’s The department of tortured poets. Those six albums dominated 2024 – not just in terms of sales and streaming, but also in terms of their overall cultural footprint. The next two? Not so much.

One of these is that of Jacob Collier Djesse Vol. 4which marks Collier’s first nomination for album of the year since the one he got for, um, Djesse Vol. 3. With thanks to NPR Music editor Jacob Ganz, who referred to this nomination as “filling Jon Batiste’s jazz-but-with-smiles spot,” the nod to Collier feels odd coming from such a crowded field of powerful contenders. Yet it is not as unexpected as the nomination for André 3000’s New blue sun – which, remember, is a collection of epic whistle-forward instrumental odysseys. OutKast was certainly a Grammy favorite, and many people were curious about André’s first record in 17 years. But… album of the year? Real?

8. Of course there were comments. Being left out of a field of five, six or eight nominees isn’t technically a “snap” — it’s really just math — but there were still surprises among this year’s Grammy omissions. By Dua Lipa Radical optimism didn’t perform as well as its predecessor, and the women’s field in pop music was unusually crowded and strong this year, but her lack of nominations feels notable. (See also: Ariana Grande, who earned three nominations but was excluded from The Big Four.) Fans may be surprised if Zach Bryan is absent from the field given how well his records performed in 2024, but he refused to submit. all his music up for consideration, so he’s gone. Perhaps the biggest surprise of all is Vampire Weekend, of which Only God stood above us was considered a lock to be nominated in several categories – possibly even album of the year – but was left out of all categories.

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 has won 24. Even a long string of controversies couldn’t dampen the Grammys’ enthusiasm for him Donda was nominated for album of the year just three years ago. But Ye’s latest album, the collaboration with Ty Dolla $ign Vultures 2yielded only one nomination, for best rap song (“Carnival”). Ye is matched or surpassed 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 forget Taylor Swift. Wait, did you just read 12 paragraphs and alone? An of them mentioned Taylor Swift? Is that even legal? Really, how dare you? Swift received a further six nominations this year, bringing her total to 58, with 24 wins, including four album of the year awards. She picked her up seventh nomination for album of the year (for The department of tortured poets), is in the running for song and record of the year (for “Fortnight”) and… hey, where are you going?