Nominations for the 2026 Grammy awards were announced over the weekend.
Australian nominees include Amyl and the Sniffers, Tame Impala, and RÜFÜS DU SOL.
Overall, Kendrick Lamar and Lady Gaga lead the list of nominees, with nine and seven nods respectively.
The winners will be announced at a ceremony on 1 February 2026.
So, how exactly are artists nominated for a Grammy?
The Academy
The Grammy Awards are the music industry’s biggest annual honours, recognising excellence across dozens of categories and genres.
The Recording Academy decides who is nominated for awards. The Academy is a membership organisation of thousands of music professionals including artists, producers, engineers, and other industry figures.
Members must be actively working in the industry to vote, making the Grammys the only completely peer-voted music awards.
In 2019, the Recording Academy changed its membership model to “create a more diverse and engaged membership base that represents all corners of the music industry.”
This included a commitment to add 2,500 women to its ranks by 2025.
This year, the Academy accepted 3,800 new members. Of these members, the Academy said half are aged 39 or younger, more than half are people of colour, and about a third are women.
The 2025 inductees included Addison Rae, Joey Bada$$, and the members of girl group KATSEYE.
Nominations
The Grammy nomination process happens across several stages.
First, record labels and Academy members submit entries for consideration. The eligibility period for the 2026 awards was between 31 August 2024 and 30 August 2025.
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This means more recent releases, such as Taylor Swift’s ‘The Life of a Showgirl’ and Cardi B’s ‘Am I The Drama?’, will be considered for the 2027 awards.
Next, Academy staff and experts review submissions to make sure they meet technical requirements and are placed in the correct categories.
Each category has its own special set of eligibility rules.
For example, an act can only submit themselves for Best New Artist consideration three times. You are also automatically ineligible for this category if you have received any Grammy nominations before as a performer, though not for other roles.
For the first time, the Grammys will include categories for ‘Best Traditional Country Album’ and ‘Best Album Cover’. The new country category comes after Beyoncé made history as the first Black woman to win Best Country Album at the 2025 ceremony.
All members can vote in four general categories: Album of the Year, Record of the Year, Song of the Year, and Best New Artist.
Record of the Year is awarded to artists, producers and engineers for the performance and production of a song.
Song of the Year is awarded to songwriters for a song’s lyrics, melody, and composition.
For other categories, members vote only in their areas of expertise — a jazz musician votes in jazz categories, a producer in production categories, and so on.
The top vote-getters in each category become the nominees. This is usually five per category, though some have more.
Once the nominees are publicly announced, members vote again to determine the winners.
2026 nominees
For the first time ever, three rap albums were nominated for Album of the Year, including Kendrick Lamar’s ‘GNX’.
New Zealand-born and Australian raised singer Rosé (from Blackpink) has also become the first ever K-pop act to be nominated for Record of the Year.
Puerto-Rican artist Bad Bunny’s album ‘DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS’ was nominated for Album of the Year, Song of the Year, and Record of the Year. He is the first Spanish-language artist to be nominated in all three categories simultaneously.
