The Recording Academy may be a tad less stodgy these days, but there is still plenty of daylight between what the Grammys considers quality and what, say, the purveyors of online music magazine Pitchfork dot com champions. So let’s try to meet in the middle. Below, we’ve provided some far-too-early Grammys prognostication on albums and songs that should be up for awards at next year’s ceremony. We’ll find out how right or wrong we were on November 16, when the official nominations are revealed. The 2027 Grammys will air February 7 on ABC.
Album of the Year
- Blood Orange: Essex Honey
- Geese: Getting Killed
- Mavis Staples: Sad and Beautiful World
- Madonna: Confessions II
- Olivia Dean: The Art of Loving
- Olivia Rodrigo: You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love
- Phoebe Bridgers: Lost Weekend
- Rosalía: LUX
As writers, it’s our job—nay, our solemn duty!—to imagine better worlds. I’ll go first: Let’s invent a timeline where Taylor Swift never released The Life of a Showgirl. Even in that alternate reality, the Swiftfluence persists in some of the category’s top contenders. Lost Weekend, Phoebe Bridgers’ long-awaited opus, has a Folklore-ic way of spinning intimate details into grand fables. And whether or not she still claims Taydaughter status, Olivia Rodrigo’s You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love is powered by the same set of rocket thrusters that once launched Red into the stratosphere: theater kid bravado, alt-rock grit, and one really bad breakup.
Let’s build out this bubble universe further. Olivia Dean is here, through the force of sheer cosmic inevitability; she won Best New Artist at the 2026 Grammys, and The Art of Loving is perfectly serviceable pop-soul. Elsewhere, on Sad and Beautiful World, Mavis Staples’ reinterpretations of everyone from Frank Ocean to Leonard Cohen serve only as further testaments to the immutability of her own presence. Madonna is, of course, another timeless icon long overdue for Big Four recognition, and Confessions II just so happens to be the best album she’s made in 20-odd years, so she makes the cut too.
Alternately, if the Grammys really want to prove they’re down with the youth, they could always give it to Getting Killed. Geese have made an exhilarating rock record that smashes together Boomer touchstones—Marquee Moon, Exile on Main Street, Remain in Light—with uniquely Gen Z abandon. And a happy medium between the old guard and the new may be found in new LPs by Rosalía and Blood Orange, two artists whose influence in shaping the last decade-plus of popular music has gone woefully unrecognized by the Grammys. —Walden Green
Record of the Year
- Ella Langley: “Choosin’ Texas”
- Slayyyter: “Dance”
- Charli xcx: “SS26”
- RAYE: “Where Is My Husband!”
- Olivia Dean: “Man I Need”
- Madonna and Sabrina Carpenter: “Bring Your Love”
- PinkPantheress: “Stateside (Zara Larsson Remix)”
- Olivia Rodrigo: “Drop Dead”
To take a page out of my colleague Walden’s alternate-universe theory, let’s pretend that, for 2027, not only did Swift not submit, but three-time ROTY winner Bruno Mars didn’t either. Then the above list might look more reasonable to Academy members. Surely, they couldn’t resist Slayyyter’s electropop banger “Dance,” which took over TikTok feeds this year. There’s also PinkPantheress and Zara Larsson’s “Telephone”-reminiscent joint, which gave both pop stars their first respective No. 1s. On “Bring Your Love,” Madonna and Sabrina Carpenter, blonde and glam as ever, whisked us to Danceteria. And after “360” was snubbed for Record of the Year at the 2025 Grammys, Charli XCX deserves a second shot with the subdued pop-rock of “SS26,” which stood out from her anti-Brat album, Music, Fashion, Film.
