The 2025 Grammys celebrated pop being back to its agenda-setting best | Alexis Petridis

It was heartening - if no surprise - to see Beyonce, Kendrick Lamar, Charli xcx and Chappell Roan all grab gongs, while an award for the Beatles suggests confidence in AI

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Like all major awards ceremonies, the Grammys spawn a mini-industry in predictions: in the weeks before the winners are announced, a rash of articles inevitably appear in which expert voices scan the nominations and foretell who's going to win. This year, you didn't really need in-depth knowledge of the music industry or the Recording Academy's internal machinations to work out what was going to happen, unless there was a major upset.

Across the previous 12 months, a succession of artists impacted in a way that pop music is no longer supposed to do. Its once-central defining role within broader popular culture is held to have been vastly diminished by social media, and yet Kendrick Lamar's Not Like Us wasn't just a huge commercial success, it influenced everything, from US sports to the campaign messaging of the American presidential election to sales of the fashion brands featured in its video: if you were going to dub anything the song of the year, it was obviously going to be that. Likewise, Charli xcx's Brat, an album which caught a mood so completely, its title wound up a widely used (if nebulously defined) adjective: the notion of it ending the night unrewarded seemed fairly unthinkable (though it didn't triumph in its biggest nominated categories).