SAN DIEGO — Will the second time be the charm at the 2026 Grammy Awards for Puerto Rican reggaeton and Latin trap-music superstar Bad Bunny, whose upcoming Feb. 8 halftime show performance at the Super Bowl has generated considerable excitement and controversy?

Or will his second bid in three years to become the first Spanish-language artist in Grammy history to win Album of the Year honors – just one week before the Super Bowl – be stymied by one of his fellow contenders in the same category? They include Lady Gaga, Sabrina Carpenter and Pulitzer Prize-winning hip-hop trailblazer Kendrick Lamar, who has a field-leading nine nominations and generated excitement and controversy as this year’s Super Bowl halftime show performer. (Lamar was also a leading nominee at last year’s Grammy Awards, winning in five of the seven categories in which he was nominated.)

These are just some of the intriguing questions posed by the nominations for the 68th edition of the Grammy Awards, which were announced Friday morning via a livestream on live.grammy.com and YouTube.

More than 23,000 recordings were submitted this year for consideration in 95 Grammy categories. The Album of the Year nominations have Lamar, Gaga, Carpenter and Bunny vying against neo-soul singer Leon Thomas, erstwhile teen idol Justin Bieber and hip-hop mavericks Tyler, the Creator and Clipse, whose “Let God Sort Em Out” is the first new full-length recording in 14 years by the Bay Area duo, which features rappers No Malice and Pusha T.

Significantly, this is the first time in Grammy history that three hip-hop releases have been nominated for Album of the Year. That is one more than in any previous year.

There are eight contenders for Record of the Year, the awards’ second most prestigious category. They include: Bad Bunny for “DtMF”; Carpenter for “Manchild”; hip-hop firebrand Doechii for “Anxiety”; Gaga for “Abracadabra”; Lamar and SZA for the all-lower-case “luther”; Chappell Roan for “The Subway”; Billie Eilish for “Wildflower”; and Black Pink singer Rosé for “APT.”, her frothy duet with Bruno Mars.

The nominees for Song of the Year, which honor the songwriters not the performers, include Bunny, Gaga, Antonoff, Watt, Eilish and Carpenter.

Elish won Best New Artist honors in 2019. This year’s nominees in that category include Thomas, Olivia Dean, Katseye, the Marias, Addison Rae, sombr, Lola Young and Alex Warren.

Conspicuously, neither Taylor Swift nor Morgan Wallen received any nominations this year, in any category, albeit for very different reasons.

Swift’s chart-topping “Life of a Showgirl” album was released Oct. 3, too late for Grammy consideration. The eligibility period for submissions was between Aug. 31, 2024, and Aug. 30, 2025.

Wallen’s chart-topping album, “I’m the Problem,” was released in May. But he declined to submit the album or any of its 37 songs for consideration to the Recording Academy, under whose auspices the Grammy Awards are presented. He did so, apparently, to protest the fact that — in his 10-year career — none of his solo work has ever received a Grammy nomination.

Not so, Lamar, who has 22 previous wins and 66 nominations for the Grammys, the music world’s most prestigious and diverse annual awards fete. His nine nominations this year include nods for Album, Record and Song of the Year. Gaga has seven nominations, including in those same three categories.

Producer, songwriter and recording engineer Jack Antonoff and Canadian producer and songwriter Cirkut (real name: Henry Russell Walter) also have seven nominations each. Thomas and Carpenter received six nominations apiece, as did Romanian-born, Canadian-based recording engineer Serban Ghenea.

Close behind, with five nominations each, are Clipse, Tyler, the Creator, producer and songwriter Andrew Watt, Doechii, the hardcore-punk-and-beyond band Turnstile, alternative-R&B songstress SZA and Sounwave, the producer and songwriter who is best known for his collaborations with this year’s top nominee, Lamar.

Only two other hip-hop artists have previously won the Album of the Year Grammy: Lauryn Hill in 1999 and Outkast in 2004. Lamar could become the third, especially if votes for Clipse and Tyler, the Creator cancel each other out.

But Lamar is not the only 2026 Grammy nominee who could make history when the winners are announced during the awards telecast at Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles on Feb. 1, which will air on CBS and stream on Paramount+.

Bunny (real name: Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio) has sung exclusively in Spanish on all his albums, including this year’s Album of the Year contender, “Debí Tirar Más Fotos” (“I Should Have Taken More Photos”). In 2022, he became the first artist in any genre to sell out two back-to-back stadium concerts at San Diego’s Petco Park. His tour that year grossed a record $435 million.

The charismatic vocalist’s ongoing 2025/2026 world tour does not include any U.S. shows. That decision, Bad Bunny disclosed in September, was predicated by his concerns that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) would seek to arrest undocumented concertgoers at — or outside — his performances.

With or without a U.S. concert leg this time around, Bunny may receive an unprecedented boost in votes.

On Wednesday, the Los Angeles-based Recording Academy announced that more than 3,800 members of the Latin Recording Academy — whose 25th annual Latin Grammy Awards in Las Vegas on Nov. 13 will feature a performance by Bad Bunny — can now vote in the four highest-profile categories for the 2026 Grammy Awards: Album, Record and Song of the Year, and Best New Artist.

“The addition of many Latin Recording Academy voting members underscores that music has no borders and that our mission to serve music people, regardless of where they are from, is stronger than ever,” said Recording Academy CEO Harvey Mason, Jr. He has strived tirelessly to diversify the nonprofit organization’s membership in the four years that he has headed the academy. With the addition of the 3,800 Latin Recording Academy members, the number of voting members for this year’s Grammy Awards has grown to nearly 15,000.

As usual, the list of nominees includes some curious omissions in the major categories.

Genre-leaping music polymath Jon Batiste, who won five Grammys in 2022 — including Album of the Year — was not nominated in that top category this year. Instead, his arresting 2025 album, “Big Money,” earned three nods, all in the Country & American Roots Music field.

Elton John and Brandi Carlile were also snubbed for Album of the Year, although their lovingly crafted collaboration — “Who Believes in Angels?” — is nominated for Best Traditional Pop Vocal Album. Likewise, “Wicked” and “KPop Demon Hunters” are each nominated in the Best Compilation Soundtrack for Visual Media, but failed to make the ballot for Album of the Year. And Kali Uchis and Lorde both released acclaimed albums within the Grammy qualifying period, but did not earn any nominations.

Two artists who did make the ballot are also two of the most seasoned contenders. Blues and soul singer Bobby Rush is 91. Willie Nelson, 92, has two nominations. One of them is Best Americana Album, for “Last Leaf on the Tree,” whose title track was written by Tom Waits.

As in the past, the winners in some of the most eclectic categories will not be announced during the Feb. 1 Grammy telecast, which — typically — includes fewer than a dozen of the 95 categories. The rest will be presented earlier that same day during the pre-telecast livestream, which is billed as the Grammy Awards Premiere Ceremony.

It is during this segment that the winner will be announced for the Best Audio Book, Narration, and Storytelling Recording. Nominees in this category include the Dalai Lama, comedian Trevor Noah, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson and former Milli Vanilli member Fab Morvan.

The full list of nominees in all 95 categories is available at Grammy.com.

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