Grindr’s Guide to the 2025 Grammys: Who We Think Should Win

Ah, the Grammys—music’s biggest night of playing it safe. If there’s one thing the Recording Academy fears more than controversy, it’s what might happen if they deny [REDACTED] another gold for her ever-expanding trophy case.

Before you get too hyped, remember: the Academy has a nearly supernatural gift for disappointing #theculture, and we’re placing bets that they’ll keep the streak alive this year.

This year, we’re over it. We’re naming our picks for who should win.

Ready to cast your own votes? We’ve created a blank Grammys ballot so you can decide for yourself. Download it here and keep score at home.

Album of the Year: Charli XCX — Brat

Look no further than your fave straight coworker, who awkwardly Shazam’d “360” at a rave while pretending they’ve “always been into electronic.” It's moments like these that prove Charli’s total takeover: she didn't just soundtrack 2024—she became it.

Brat is the sound of pop music mainlining 2024’s contradictions—the “I’m baby” infantilization of adulthood, the grand “delulu is the solulu” cope of just about everything, and the art of crying in a club bathroom while your Instagram story hits 300 views. It wants to be screamed, snorted, and maybe thrown at someone’s head. Talking about it is like trying to describe a nightclub while you’re still drunk as hell in the bathroom. You can’t do it justice—you just know it changed you. Grammy winner or not, Brat won 2024.

Best Pop Solo Performance: Sabrina Carpenter — Espresso

Sabrina Carpenter’s Espresso distills pop’s current formula to its purest, most addictive shot: a TikTok-engineered hook designed to hijack dopamine pathways and lyrics that mock influencer narcissism while embodying it. It’s pop as both commentary and complicity, a hyper-aware product of the machine that mocks the machine. And then there’s “That’s that me espresso”, a line that’s either the dumbest genius or the geniusest dumb thing ever uttered—a mantra for the ADHD generation that needs everything to be both sincere and a joke at the same time.

Record of the Year: Chappell Roan — Good Luck, Babe!

This year, there’s a radioactive pink elephant in the room, and her name is Chappell Roan. Good Luck, Babe! is a masterclass in shading the girl that broke your heart. With vocal acrobatics swinging between a Broadway diva mid-exorcism and Kate Bush on Adderall, Roan commands every second of the spotlight. And the Academy? They love a good narrative. Here's one: a song that clawed its way to a billion streams without a TikTok challenge, a celebrity collab, or a Pepsi-funded Super Bowl ad—just a chorus that cuts deep and a bridge that spells it out for you: Girl, you gay. Roan is queering the timeline, and it’s just the beginning.

Song of the Year: Kendrick Lamar — Not Like Us

Billboard No. 1. TikTok ubiquity. Political campaigns hijacking its hook. It’s the rare diss that’s bigger than the feud— a victory lap so ruthless, a fully grown-ass man lawyered up because he couldn’t handle the read. And yet, the discourse will fixate on decorum—as if hip-hop stars owe us grace, as if every lyric must pass some moral purity test. But it's all bunk—the Academy’s been handing trophies to breakup anthems and thinly veiled roasts since Taylor Swift weaponized a red lip. “Not Like Us” just cuts out the metaphor and hands you the knife.

Best New Artist: Chappell Roan

After being dropped by her label, Chappell Roan financed her own album and reasserted control over her career. However, 2024 showed us that fans often claim to value authenticity—up until it arrives in an inconvenient tone. Roan’s so-called “manic” public appearances, from her unfiltered rants and canceled shows to her refusal to perform at the White House, do not constitute a PR crisis so much as they illustrate an artist unwilling to commodify her psyche. In doing so, Chappell Roan’s done us all a service: made pop music feel dangerous again. Not dangerous in a way that’s scandalous, dangerous in a way that tells the truth. And if that’s not “Best New Artist” material, then maybe the category’s broken, too.

Best Pop Duo: Guess — Charli XCX feat. Billie Eilish

If someone fed a 2004 iPod Nano through a woodchipper, Guess is what would come right out. Charli and Billie resurrected Y2K-era rave girl grit and contaminated it with 2024’s dystopian sheen. And while people are, of course, dissecting every bit of the sapphic undertones—whether it’s too calculated, whether Billie’s queerness feels “authentic” enough—none of that seems to matter. It’s messy and fun and weirdly intimate in a blasé, indifferent kind of way, like you’re catching a private joke between two people who know exactly how to stir things up without breaking a sweat.

Best Producer: Dan Nigro

Dan Nigro’s most recent outputs—Olivia Rodrigo’s Guts and Chappell Roan’s The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess—are clinics in producer-as-chameleon. With Rodrigo, he channeled teenage spite into scuffed pop-punk. With Roan, he inverted the approach: disco synths that glint like rhinestones on a thrift-store jacket, their artificial sheen offset by the earthy grain of her delivery, as if the Midwest itself were humming beneath the gloss. The through line? His work is a case study in how production can amplify authenticity by refusing to “fix” it. The Academy loves star-making hitmakers, and Nigro’s the man proving that sincerity is still pop’s most powerful currency.

The 67th Annual Grammy Awards airs this Sunday, February 2, 2025, at 8 p.m. ET/5 p.m. PT on CBS and Paramount+. The Premiere Ceremony begins earlier at 12:30 p.m. PT, streaming live on Grammy.com and YouTube.