Lady Gaga and Bad Bunny lead 2026 Grammy Awards nominations

Will the second time be the charm at the 2026 Grammy Awards for Puerto Rican reggaeton and Latin trap-music superstar Bad Bunny, whose upcoming Feb. 8 halftime show performance at the Super Bowl has generated considerable excitement and controversy?

Or will his second bid in three years to become the first Spanish-language artist in Grammy history to win Album of the Year honors — just one week before the Super Bowl — be stymied by one of his fellow contenders in the same category? They include Lady Gaga, Sabrina Carpenter and Pulitzer Prize-winning hip-hop trailblazer Kendrick Lamar, who has a field-leading nine nominations and generated excitement and controversy as this year’s Super Bowl halftime show performer. (Lamar was also a leading nominee at last year’s Grammy Awards, winning in five of the seven categories in which he was nominated.)

These are just some of the intriguing questions posed by the nominations for the 68th edition of the Grammy Awards, which were announced Friday morning via a livestream on live.grammy.com and YouTube. More than 23,000 recordings were submitted this year for consideration in 95 Grammy categories. The Album of the Year nominations have Lamar, Gaga, Carpenter and Bunny vying against neo-soul singer Leon Thomas, erstwhile teen idol Justin Bieber and hip-hop mavericks Tyler, the Creator and Clipse, whose “Let God Sort Em Out” is the first new full-length recording in 14 years by the Bay Area duo, which features rappers No Malice and Pusha T.

Significantly, this is the first time in Grammy history that three hip-hop releases have been nominated for Album of the Year. That is one more than in any previous year.

There are eight contenders for Record of the Year, the awards’ second most prestigious category. They include: Bad Bunny for “DtMF”; Carpenter for “Manchild”; hip-hop firebrand Doechii for “Anxiety”; Gaga for “Abracadabra”; Lamar and SZA for the all-lower-case “luther”; Chappell Roan for “The Subway”; Billie Eilish for “Wildflower”; and Black Pink singer Rosé for “APT.”, her frothy duet with Bruno Mars.

The nominees for Song of the Year, which honor the songwriters not the performers, include Bunny, Gaga, Antonoff, Watt, Eilish and Carpenter.

Elish won Best New Artist honors in 2019. This year’s nominees in that category include Thomas, Olivia Dean, Katseye, the Marias, Addison Rae, sombr, Lola Young and Alex Warren.

Conspicuously, neither Taylor Swift nor Morgan Wallen received any nominations this year, in any category, albeit for very different reasons.

Swift’s chart-topping “Life of a Showgirl” album was released Oct. 3, too late for Grammy consideration. The eligibility period for submissions was between Aug. 31, 2024, and Aug. 30, 2025.

Wallen’s chart-topping album, “I’m the Problem,” was released in May. But he declined to submit the album or any of its 37 songs for consideration to the Recording Academy, under whose auspices the Grammy Awards are presented.

Tribune News Service