When the nominees for the 2025 Grammys were announced this past fall, it was a momentous occasion. Beyoncé broke a record she shared with her husband, Jay-Z, to become the most-nominated artist in Grammys history after snagging 11 nods — including for Record, Song, and Album of the Year — for her 2024 country (or at least country-inspired) album, Cowboy Carter. With that impressive feat, the vocal powerhouse has now racked up 99 nominations. It’s just another feather in the cap of a performer who has 32 gramophones to her name — the most of any artist in Grammys history.

Several other artists had reason to celebrate: Billie Eilish, Post Malone, Charli XCX, and Kendrick Lamar all earned seven nominations, while Grammy favorite Taylor Swift and first-time nominees Sabrina Carpenter and Chappell Roan scored six.

Of course, the burning question on everyone’s mind when the 67th Annual Grammy Awards kick off Sunday, Feb. 2, at Los Angeles’ Crypto.com Arena is if Bey will finally, finally click her wrist and strut away holding the trophy that has eluded her time and time again: Album of the Year. She has some stiff competition, but so do the musicians up for the other most coveted prizes of the night: Record of the Year, Song of the Year, and Best New Artist.

We get into all of this — including our picks for who should win in the Big Four categories — on the latest episode of The Awardist podcast, which you can check out below. But if you want a taste of our predictions of who will win on music’s biggest night, read on.

Best New Artist

Benson Boone
Chappell Roan
Doechii
Khruangbin
Raye
Sabrina Carpenter
Shaboozey
Teddy Swims

Who will win: In one sense, this is the easiest category to predict. In another, it’s the hardest. Though all these artists have had a banner year — Shaboozey’s “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” spent a record-tying, staggering 19 weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 — the race will come down to Sabrina Carpenter and Chappell Roan. They were everywhere in 2024, dominating headlines, killing it at festivals, and bolting up the charts. They were neck and neck when it came time to declare the “Song of the Summer,” Carpenter with her slick, sticky “Espresso” and Roan with her cloud-busting kiss-off “Good Luck, Babe!”

But while you could argue whether either are truly new — they’ve both been putting out music for years — Roan’s most recent album,The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess, is her first, while Carpenter’s latest, Short n’ Sweet, is her sixth. Maybe “Espresso” finally got us to perk up and acknowledge the former Disney star’s pop bona fides, but Roan’s meteoric, well, rise seemed to happen overnight. Her music and persona hits that rare sweet spot between arty and commercial, and the fact that she’s been open about her struggles with her sudden success has only made her more relatable — always a good thing for a pop star.

Song of the Year

Beyoncé – “Texas Hold ‘Em”
Billie Eilish – “Birds of a Feather”
Chappell Roan – “Good Luck, Babe!”
Kendrick Lamar – “Not Like Us”
Lady Gaga & Bruno Mars – “Die With a Smile”
Sabrina Carpenter – “Please Please Please”
Shaboozey – “A Bar Song (Tipsy)”
Taylor Swift feat. Post Malone – “Fortnight”

Who will win: You can’t discount “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” given its tremendous reign over the charts — Shaboozey is the first Black male artist to sit at No. 1 on Billboard‘s Hot 100 and Hot Country Songs charts at the same time — but a twangy drinking anthem that interpolates a 2004 rap single might be a tough sell for stuffier voters. Plenty of critics deemed Kendrick Lamar’s nimble, eviscerating “Not Like Us” the song of 2024, but is the Recording Academy really ready to give a major award to a diss track that contains the lyrics “certified pedophile”?

Shockingly, Taylor Swift has never won Song of the Year, despite being nominated for the songwriting award eight times. But compared to all these other enduring hits, “Fortnight” felt impactful for about as long as its title suggests. “Good Luck, Babe!” is the freshest and best of the bunch, but when it comes to the Grammys, tried-and-true trumps novelty. Billie Eilish is a Grammys go-to who has scooped up this award twice already (for “Bad Guy” and “What Was I Made For?”), and “Birds of a Feather” is the CoverGirl of pop songs: easy, breezy, beautiful. Expect her to fly away with the trophy for a third time.

Check out more from EW’s The Awardist, featuring exclusive interviews, analysis, and our podcast diving into all the highlights from the year’s best TV, movies, and music.

Album of the Year

André 3000 – New Blue Sun
Beyoncé – Cowboy Carter
Billie Eilish – Hit Me Hard and Soft
Chappell Roan – The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess
Charli XCX – Brat
Jacob Collier – Djesse Vol. 4
Sabrina Carpenter – Short n’ Sweet
Taylor Swift – The Tortured Poets Department

Who will win: Charli XCX is long overdue for some Grammys hardware — before her recent noms she’d only ever been nominated as a duo with Iggy Azalea for “Fancy,” and that was a decade ago. And you’d have to be in a coma to be unfamiliar with Brat, a rave-y, meme-y slime-green behemoth that destroyed everything in its path last year. It was more than just an album. Brat was summer. Brat was Kamala. Brat was a way of life. Still, dance albums rarely win Album of the Year. Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories took the prize in 2014, but it was the duo’s love letter to the ’70s funk and disco and ’80s soft rock they grew up with, and the Academy loves a throwback (Silk Sonic, anyone?). Brat is busy, messy, shape-shifting, and boundless — way closer to the sound of the future. It’s a lot — probably too much for the voting body.

Given that she didn’t win for 2013’s Beyoncé (!), 2016’s Lemonade (!!), or 2022’s Renaissance (!!!), isn’t it about time Queen Bey got the crown that seems eternally just out of reach? Cowboy Carter didn’t rope us in like that holy trifecta of albums, and a win for the diva in this category this year would essentially be a lifetime achievement award for the most important artist of the 21st century. But would that be a bad thing? Not nearly as bad as Swift riding off into the sunset with her fifth Album of the Year win while Beyoncé remains empty-handed. That said, don’t rule out Hit Me Hard and Soft. Eilish and Finneas’ third album experimented with tempos and genres but was still accessible, and it featured the singer’s most uninhibited vocals and songwriting to date. The beloved siblings may have tweaked their formula just enough to sway voters looking for something new but not too new.

Record of the Year

The Beatles – “Now and Then”
Beyoncé – “Texas Hold ‘Em”
Billie Eilish – “Birds of a Feather”
Chappell Roan – “Good Luck, Babe!”
Charli XCX – “360”
Kendrick Lamar – “Not Like Us”
Sabrina Carpenter – “Espresso”
Taylor Swift feat. Post Malone – “Fortnight”

Who will win: This one’s tricky. When would a Beyoncé bop ever seem like the weakest opponent in the mix? But “Texas Hold ‘Em” just didn’t make the dent that most of these other singles did. Remember, Record of the Year honors the whole shebang — not only the artists, but the producers and engineers involved in the song. Charli’s “360” might be flaunting too much electronic wizardry, while the ’80s sheen of “Fortnight” and “Espresso” — as warm and sugary as it is — may not be quite flashy enough. “Not Like Us” dishes out menacing beats, squawky sax, and impossibly perfect verses from a Pulitzer winner, but all that might get lost in the thorniness of its subject matter.

That leaves the newbie, the legends, and the Academy darling. In an ideal scenario, the voting body would take a break from Billie — who already netted this award two years in a row, in 2020 and 2021 — and spread the love to Chappell & Co., whose sparkling tale of a queer love denied boasts irresistibly plinky keyboards, a mille-feuille of yodel-y vocals, and the best bridge since the Golden Gate. But with their recently unearthed, AI-assisted, and, we’ll admit, timeless-sounding restoration of a 1977 John Lennon demo, surviving Beatles members Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr — with a little help from their late bandmates and producers — have practically served up Record of the Year on a silver platter. Did we mention that the Fab Four have never, in 60 years, taken home this prize? Finally awarding them for what is said to be their swan song would, for many, feel like the perfect coda to the evening.

The 2025 Grammys air live on Feb. 2 at 8 p.m. ET/5 p.m. PT on CBS and Paramount+. Check out the full list of Grammy nominations here.