LOS ANGELES — Kendrick Lamar and Lady Gaga will face off for album of the year at the 68th Grammy Awards, a first-time showdown between two megastars of modern music who’ve separately been nominated four previous times without winning the Recording Academy’s most prestigious prize.

As announced Friday morning by the academy, Lamar leads nominees for next year’s ceremony with nine nods in all, followed by Gaga and the producers Cirkut and Jack Antonoff, each of whom has seven nominations, and Bad Bunny, Sabrina Carpenter and Leon Thomas, each of whom has six. Other top nominees include the rappers Doechii, Clipse and Tyler, the Creator as well as the producers Sounwave and Andrew Watt, the rock band Turnstile and the recording engineer Serban Ghenea.

The 68th Grammys will take place Feb. 1 at Crypto.com Arena in downtown Angeles.

For Lamar, the album of the year nod — for his “GNX,” which came out with about half an hour’s notice last November — follows a triumphant showing at the most recent Grammys ceremony, where the Compton-born rapper won record of the year and song of the year with “Not Like Us,” the festive Drake diss he went on to perform at the Super Bowl halftime show. His album nomination makes him the first solo artist in Grammys history to compete for that prize with five consecutive studio albums.

Lamar is nominated for the record and song prizes again with “Luther,” his and SZA’s tender duet that samples Luther Vandross and Cheryl Lynn’s “If This World Were Mine.”

Gaga’s album of the year nod recognizes “Mayhem,” a widely praised return to her signature dance-pop sound that led to an even more widely praised tour that launched at April’s Coachella festival. The singer will also go head to head with Lamar for record and song with her single “Abracadabra”; her nominations in those categories, neither of which she’s ever won, are her fourth and fifth, respectively.

Also nominated for album of the year, which can be understood as the Grammys’ equivalent of best picture: Carpenter’s “Man’s Best Friend,” Bad Bunny’s “Debí Tirar Más Fotos,” Clipse’s “Let God Sort Em Out,” Thomas’ “Mutt,” Tyler’s “Chromakopia” and Justin Bieber’s “Swag.”

This is the first time three rap LPs have been nominated for album of the year at the same ceremony — an achievement that comes just days after Billboard reported that no rap songs were in the top 40 of its Hot 100 singles chart for the first time since 1990.

More firsts: Rosé’s “Apt.,” which the Blackpink member wrote and recorded with Bruno Mars, is up for record and song of the year, while “Golden,” from the smash Netflix film “ KPop Demon Hunters,” is nominated for song of the year; these are the first major-category Grammy nods for artists from the world of K-pop.

The remaining nominees for record of the year are Bad Bunny’s “DtMF,” Carpenter’s “Manchild,” Eilish’s “Wildflower,” Chappell Roan’s “The Subway” and Doechii’s “Anxiety,” the last of which prominently samples a previous record of the year winner in 2011’s “Somebody That I Used to Know” by Gotye and Kimbra.

“Anxiety,” “DtMF” “Manchild” and “Wildflower” are also nominated for song of the year. (The record prize goes to performers and producers, while the song prize recognizes songwriters.) Eilish’s nod for “Wildflower,” which the 23-year-old wrote with her brother, Finneas O’Connell, brings her career nominations in the song category to six — and evens her up with Paul McCartney and Lionel Richie.

The strong showing for hip-hop, K-pop and Latin pop — “Debí Tirar Más Fotos” is just the second Spanish-language LP to be nominated for album of the year (after Bad Bunny’s “Un Verano Sin Ti” in 2023) — can be seen as a result of the academy’s efforts to diversify its membership along age, race and gender lines. This month the group said it had added 3,800 new members, half of whom are under 40 and 58% of whom are people of color; 35% of the new members identify as women, the academy said.

Yet the major categories also had more room thanks to the absence of reliable Grammy faves such as Taylor Swift, Beyoncé and Adele, none of whom released recordings eligible for February’s ceremony. The window ran from Aug. 31, 2024, to Aug. 30, 2025 — just a few weeks before Swift dropped her blockbuster “The Life of a Showgirl,” which will no doubt be showered with nods at the 69th Grammys.

The academy said more than 23,000 recordings were submitted for consideration this year across 95 categories, including one for audio book in which a collection of meditations by the Dalai Lama is up against Fab Morvan’s account of his days in Milli Vanilli. Nominations were determined by approximately 15,000 industry professionals, who will go on to decide the winners in a second voting round scheduled to start Dec. 12.

Among the nominees for best new artist, only Thomas scored a nod in another of the show’s major categories — something of a rarity at the Grammys, where young stars such as Carpenter, Roan, Eilish, Lizzo and Olivia Rodrigo have been nominated for all four big prizes in recent years. The other acts up for best new artist are Olivia Dean, Katseye, the Marías, Addison Rae, Sombr, Alex Warren and Lola Young.

Further down the ballot, “GNX,” “Chromakopia” and “Let God Sort Em Out” will compete with GloRilla’s “Glorious” and JID’s “God Does Like Ugly” for the rap album award. For rock album, the nominees are Deftones “Private Music,” Haim’s “I Quit,” Linkin Park’s “From Zero,” Turnstile’s “Never Enough” and Yungblud’s “Idols.”

Following Beyoncé’s win for country album at February’s ceremony with “Cowboy Carter” (which was also named album of the year ), the academy split the country album award into a prize for traditional country album and a prize for contemporary country album — a move criticized by some as an instance of racialized gatekeeping.

The nominees for traditional country album are Charley Crockett’s “Dollar a Day,” Margo Price’s “Hard Headed Woman,” Zach Top’s “Ain’t In It for My Health” and competing LPs by a father and son in Willie Nelson’s “Oh What a Beautiful World” and Lukas Nelson’s “American Romance.” For contemporary country album, the nominees are Kelsea Ballerini’s “Patterns,” Tyler Childers’ “Snipe Hunter,” Eric Church’s “Evangeline vs. the Machine,” Jelly Roll’s “Beautifully Broken” and Miranda Lambert’s “Postcards from Texas.”

Morgan Wallen’s “I’m the Problem” — the year’s second-biggest album of any genre after Swift’s “The Life of a Showgirl” — wasn’t nominated because Wallen didn’t submit his music for Grammys consideration. The country superstar is one of a handful of musicians, along with Frank Ocean and Zach Bryan, who’ve declined to take part in the awards show in recent years as a kind of implied protest against what they view as a restrictive and old-fashioned system.

One former abstainer, the Weeknd, returned to the Grammys with a performance at the most recent show that was introduced by the Recording Academy’s chief executive, Harvey Mason Jr. Yet the Weeknd’s album “Hurry Up Tomorrow” received no nominations for next year’s ceremony.

The 68th Grammys will be the last in the academy’s half-century-long pact with CBS, which has broadcast the awards show since 1973. In 2027, Disney’s ABC network will take control of the Grammys to start a 10-year deal.

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