Grammys 2026: Bad Bunny, Kendrick Lamar and Lady Gaga lead the race

The music industry’s biggest night returns with a Grammy Awards ceremony shaped as much by cultural moment as by musical merit. At the centre of it all is a razor-thin Album of the Year race between Bad Bunny, Kendrick Lamar and Lady Gaga, three global stars chasing a Grammy milestone none of them has claimed before.

Trevor Noah will host the Grammys for the sixth and final time, with the ceremony airing live from Los Angeles’ Crypto.com Arena. The show will be broadcast on CBS and streamed on Paramount+ from 5 pm local time. In India, viewers can watch the event live on JioHotstar from 6.30 am IST on Monday.

Awards watchers say Album of the Year is unusually hard to call this time. Bad Bunny is nominated for Debí Tirar Más Fotos, a record that could become the first Spanish-language album to win the top prize in the Grammys’ 68-year history. Kendrick Lamar is in contention for GNX and could become the first solo male rapper to take home Album of the Year, a category previously won by only two hip-hop acts, Lauryn Hill and Outkast. Lady Gaga, despite a career spanning over two decades and multiple Grammy wins, has never won any of the top four awards. Her latest album Mayhem could finally change that.

Billboard awards editor Paul Grein has tipped Lamar as a likely winner, pointing to his dominant performance at last year’s Grammys, where he won five awards for the single Not Like Us. At the same time, Bad Bunny’s cultural visibility may influence voters. The Puerto Rican star recently skipped touring the continental US, citing fears around immigration raids affecting his fans, and his upcoming Super Bowl halftime show has sparked debate over language and representation. According to Grein, that broader cultural backdrop could work in his favour.

Beyond the headline categories, this year’s Grammys reflect the Recording Academy’s evolving voter base. Roughly 15,000 industry professionals now vote on the awards, with 73 percent of members joining since 2019. Around 1,000 Latin Grammys voters became eligible this year, a shift Academy CEO Harvey Mason Jr. says mirrors the global rise of genres like K-pop and Afrobeats.

That change is visible in the nominations. K-pop enters the Song of the Year race through Golden from the Netflix film KPop Demon Hunters, competing with APT., a collaboration between Rosé and Bruno Mars. APT. is also nominated for Record of the Year alongside Lamar’s luther featuring SZA and Gaga’s Abracadabra.

In the Best New Artist category, R&B and soul musician Leon Thomas is widely seen as a frontrunner, with British singer Olivia Dean and pop artist Alex Warren also in the mix. Performances are set from Sabrina Carpenter, Addison Rae and all eight Best New Artist nominees, with producers teasing unannounced surprise appearances.

With history on the line in multiple categories, the 2026 Grammys promise a night where the winners may say as much about where music is headed as what dominated the charts.
(With inputs from Reuters)