Seven Albums Are in Every Grammy Forecast. The Eighth Slot Is the Fight.

Everything in this piece is a prediction until 7:45 a.m. ET on Monday, when the Recording Academy reads the actual list on Grammy.com. What follows is the forecast state of play — three trade publications' predicted fields, compared — because the disagreements are more informative than the consensus.

Album of the Year: the agreed seven

Variety, Billboard and Rolling Stone independently put the same seven albums in their predicted eight: Olivia Dean's The Art of Loving, Noah Kahan's The Great Divide, Ella Langley's Dandelion, Bruno Mars's The Romantic, Olivia Rodrigo's You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love, Rosalía's Lux, and Taylor Swift's The Life of a Showgirl. When three competing forecasters with three different source networks land on the same seven, that's as close to a lock as this exercise gets.

The eighth slot is where they split. Billboard and Variety give it to RAYE's This Music May Contain Hope; Rolling Stone gives it to Phoebe Bridgers' Lost Weekend and predicts Rodrigo wins the category outright. Gold Derby's surveyed voters cut against the trades in an interesting way: Dean was the only artist all three of its anonymous voters named — their frontrunner across the general field — while Swift and Mars, listed as frontrunners by all three trades, went undiscussed by the voters, who described both albums as critically disfavoured. Somebody in that paragraph is wrong, and Monday settles it.

Named snub risks (Variety's "could get in" tier, echoed in part by Billboard's "within reach" list): Lily Allen's West End Girl, Ariana Grande's Petal, Madonna's Confessions II, Harry Styles' Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally, Tame Impala's Deadbeat, Kacey Musgraves' Middle of Nowhere. If any of the agreed seven misses, it'll be for one of these.

Record and Song: the forecasters can't agree on the songs

Record of the Year forecasts agree on the artists — Dean, Langley ("Choosin' Texas"), Mars ("I Just Might"), RAYE ("Where Is My Husband!"), Rodrigo ("The Cure"), Kahan, Swift ("The Fate of Ophelia") — and split on Dean's entry: Variety and Rolling Stone predict "Man I Need"; Billboard predicts "So Easy (To Fall in Love)." Variety also names its own cuts: forced to drop two of its ten, it would drop Grande and Rosalía's "Berghain" — which is as explicit as snub-risk labelling gets, and Rolling Stone disagrees, putting "Berghain" in its eight.

Song of the Year repeats the pattern with different songs: the trades split on Swift's entry (Billboard and Variety say "I Knew It, I Knew You"; Rolling Stone says "The Fate of Ophelia") and on Mars's (Variety says "Risk It All"; the others say "I Just Might"). And Variety reports two acts who simply aren't in the deck at all: BTS and PinkPantheress with Zara Larsson ("Stateside") weren't submitted — the only true locks in this entire piece are the absences.

Best New Artist: a two-name race with an eight-name field

Billboard and Rolling Stone publish different predicted eights — they share Langley, Geese, Bella Kay, Sienna Spiro and Malcolm Todd, then diverge (Billboard: Dominic Fike, Megan Moroney, Role Model; Rolling Stone: Slayyyter, Audrey Hobert, Ravyn Lenae). Variety, which hadn't published a full field, frames the race as Langley versus Spiro. One structural fact matters underneath the names, per Billboard: the entry cap rose from three to four this cycle, restoring eligibility for Langley, Moroney, Ken Carson, Ravyn Lenae and Geese — several of the names above are only in this category because the rule moved.

The full calendar — nominations Monday, final-round voting December 10 to January 7, the ceremony February 7 on ABC for the first time since 1972 — is in our awards-season dates piece, linked below. Monday's list will make this forecast look prescient or foolish in the usual proportions. We will publish the comparison either way.