The nominations for the 2025 Grammys have been announced, revealing all the artists who will be up for honors at the Recording Academy’s 67th award ceremony in February. Music fans who review the full list of nominees or listen to our playlist may notice something that, while not surprising, is still noteworthy: Many of the artists up for Best New Artist aren’t all that “new.”
It’s a long-running trend with the Best New Artist category, which has historically been a little confounding. In years past, many artists who already seemed fairly established to music fans found themselves nominated for the award, sometimes even years after making their actual debut. Think Alessia Cara winning the award in 2018, Chance the Rapper in 2017, or Fun. in 2013, all years after they started their careers.
The Best New Artist category at the 2025 Grammys is no exception. Among the nominees are Sabrina Carpenter, who first started releasing music over a decade ago, putting out five studio albums before being nominated with this year’s Short n’ Sweet, and Khruangbin, who have been alt-rock darlings since releasing their debut album in 2015.
Joining them are RAYE, who has been releasing EPs since 2014 and dropped her debut “mini-album,” Euphoric Sad Songs, in 2020; Shaboozey, whose Lady Wrangler debut arrived in 2018; Doechii, with three mixtapes and a pair of EPs to her name since 2019; Teddy Swims, whose I’ve Tried Everything but Therapy (Part 1) debut actually dropped one day before the 2025 Grammy eligibility period; and Benson Boone, who started releasing music not long after appearing on American Idol in 2021.
Even the seemingly overnight superstar (and former CoSign!) Chappell Roan, whose first full-length, The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess, is barely a year old, has been charting singles since 2020.
Looking through this list of nominees, it’s clear that literally none of them actually “debuted” during the eligibility time for the 2025 Grammys. So, what exactly does Best “New” Artist mean, anyways?
Well, as Grammy CEO Harvey Mason, Jr. has explained, it’s not really Best “New” Artist, but rather “Best Breakthrough Year for an Artist.” Speaking with The Hollywood Reporter this week, he said, “For me, what it comes down to is when an artist rises to national or international prominence. It could be their first record, it could be their sixth record. To me, this feels like a time when our Best New Artists have broken through and become nationally prominent and are doing amazing work.”
To that end, the eligibility requirements for the award make enough sense. The Recording Academy states that any Best New Artists nominee must have released a minimum of five songs or one album, may not have submitted for the category more than three times, and must have “achieved a breakthrough into the public consciousness during the eligibility period.”
But still, according to Mason, ascertaining a “breakthrough into the public consciousness” can be a tricky task. “I was going to say it’s pretty simple, but it’s actually not that simple,” he said. “It’s difficult, and it’s challenging because it’s a little bit amorphous how you would evaluate Best New Artist… It is not an easy calculus to decide which artist fits that criteria and which doesn’t, but I trust our committees that do that work, and I trust the voters to vote for the right people and I’m really pleased with the outcome.”
With that in mind, the 2025 Best New Artist nominees feel a lot more fitting. Sure, Roan has been making music for over seven years, but who could deny that The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess has marked a paradigm shift in her career, bringing her into public consciousness in a major way?
The same could be said for artists like Shaboozey; even though he was featured on the soundtrack for Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse in 2018, his contributions to Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter and the success of “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” surely constitute a similar breakthrough moment. Even Carpenter, who’s been in the public eye for well over a decade, has certainly come into her own with Short n’ Sweet.
One act still feels like a bit of an outlier, though: Khruangbin, the psych rock trio that first formed in 2010. They released their debut album, The Universe Smiles Upon You, in 2015, and have been highly active since then, even making a pair of collaborative EPs with Leon Bridges earlier this decade. As it stands, only two of their 10 most popular songs on Spotify were released during the eligibility period of the 2025 Grammys.
Some have made arguments that, by including these already-popular artists, genuinely “new” acts are skipped over for a chance of mainstream recognition — but in all honesty, you can apparently submit for the category three times, and an observable career breakthrough is something worthy of an award in itself. Maybe it’s time, though, that the Recording Academy considers re-naming this category, to finally put all this “what does it mean to be new?” confusion to rest.
Now, if you’d like to explore the music of this year’s Best New Artists yourself, you can listen to a Consequence-curated playlist on Amazon Music below.
For more, you can spend the months between now and the 2025 Grammys (February 2nd) listening to all the nominees on Amazon Music thanks to the platform’s holiday deal, offering a three-month free trial for Amazon Music Unlimited, with over 100 million songs in HD sound and the largest catalog of ad-free podcasts.
