Nominations for this coming year’s Grammy Awards were announced this Monday morning. Kendrick Lamar lead the pack with 11 nominations, with Taylor Swift and The Weeknd trailing with seven. Here are some of my reactions to nominations for four of the biggest categories.

Album of the Year

Alabama Shakes – “Sound & Color”

Chris Stapleton – “Traveller”

Kendrick Lamar – “To Pimp a Butterfly”

Taylor Swift – “1989”

The Weeknd – “Beauty Behind the Madness”

I can’t speak for the quality of Chris Stapleton’s album here (chide me all you want for generally ignoring country music) but overall this is one of the strongest Album of the Year fields the Grammys have had in years. This list represents all of the biggest corners of today’s American music scene. Taylor Swift and The Weeknd provide both ends of pop, Swift with the dancier side and The Weeknd with the R&B-heavier side.

The Alabama Shakes’ album was an early 2015 release I thought most would forget, so the fact that the Grammys felt like honoring it with a well-earned nomination is something to appreciate. Meanwhile, Kendrick Lamar’s “To Pimp a Butterfly” is one of the most innovative albums in years. The fact that the Grammys have gone from snubbing him for a forgettable Macklemore album in 2014 to handing him the most nominations of any artist for 2016 shows how far the ceremony has come. The combination of the album’s sheer quality, the Kendrick apology story and the Grammys’ recent trend to hand this award to “less traditional” artists makes this album my early favorite to win.

Record of the Year

D’Angelo and The Vanguard – “Really Love”

Ed Sheeran – “Thinking Out Loud”

Mark Ronson (ft. Bruno Mars) – “Uptown Funk”

Taylor Swift – “Blank Space”

The Weeknd – “Can’t Feel My Face”

Grammys 101: Record of the Year is given to the best overall recording, while Song of the Year is handed to the songwriters. I’m pulling for D’Angelo to walk away with the award in this category– it’s the strongest track on this list by far. The R&B singer’s 2014 release “Black Messiah” has been criminally underrepresented on most year-end lists due to its unexpected release last December, so getting a nomination at all is something the Grammys should be celebrated for.

“Can’t Feel My Face” is produced well enough, but The Weeknd has nothing on the frontrunners in this category. Ed Sheeran’s “Thinking Out Loud,” as nice of a singer-songwriter pop song as it might be, has nothing special about its recording that deserves formal recognition; other eligible nominees like “See You Again” and “Alright” (both nominated for Song of the Year instead) would make a lot more sense for this award. And though Taylor Swift is the early favorite to sweep both record and song of the year, I’m giving the nod to Mark Ronson, Bruno Mars and “Uptown Funk” on this one — besides its sheer popularity, the song’s production value alone should be enough to carry it over Swift this time around.

Song of the Year

Ed Sheeran – “Thinking Out Loud”

Kendrick Lamar – “Alright”

Little Big Town – “Girl Crush”

Taylor Swift – “Blank Space”

Wiz Khalifa (ft. Charlie Puth) – “See You Again”

Taylor Swift has already run away with this one. She’s won seven Grammy Awards to date, but lost Song of the Year to Sam Smith last year. Now she’s up again with the biggest song from “1989” this side of “Shake It Off,” and none of the other nominees have nearly as big a chance of taking the award. “Thinking Out Loud” deserves more credit for its writing than production, so a nomination here makes sense (even though it got nods for both Song and Record of the Year).

“Girl Crush” is a moderately clever pop-country song about a girl that wishes she was another girl because she took her man; formulaic, sure, but the classic love story disguised as a lesbian fantasy thing was enough for a nomination, I guess. “See You Again” is good enough, especially as a tribute to the late “Fast and Furious” actor Paul Walker, but it’s probably peaked as a nomination. “Alright” is fantastically written and (if you couldn’t tell from my gushing about “To Pimp a Butterfly” through this whole article) my favorite of the bunch, but Kendrick is much more likely to get recognized for his album as a whole than one song off of it, especially when matched up against the unstoppable force that is Taylor Swift.

Best New Artist

Courtney Barnett

James Bay

Meghan Trainor

Sam Hunt

Tori Kelly

This is usually the most fun Grammys category, since this is where the Grammys branch out the most at recognizing newly-risen talent in the world of music. The category is really fun to look at in retrospect — 2014 saw Macklemore & Ryan Lewis beat out Ed Sheeran and Kendrick Lamar, who are in contention for a lot more major categories than the former this year. Early favorite Hozier was left out of nominations entirely, so instead we’re left with one of the stranger Best New Artist fields of late.

Meghan Trainor might be the oddest selection of this bunch, if only for the fact that she received two major award nominations in last year’s Grammys (Song of the Year and Record of the Year, both for “All About That Bass”). There’s always been controversy over what’s considered a “new” artist, but nominating an artist that’s already been up for Grammys before is bizarre nonetheless. I’ll put her as the favorite of the bunch, but this category has tons of upset potential so it’s still anyone’s game to play. The other nominees fit other niches for this category; Tori Kelly and James Bay represent both ends of the pop singer-songwriter spectrum, Kelly with a more upbeat sound and Bay with a slower, mellower one. Sam Hunt, a pop-country singer-songwriter, might be second in popularity to Trainor for this award, but I can hardly see voters uniting behind his cause here.

Courtney Barnett’s my favorite of the nominees for this award by far, though; her 2015 album “Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit” is one of my favorites of the year, and critical reception for the album might be hard for voters to ignore. Don’t be shocked if she gets the win over Trainor — last time an artist this well-regarded was against a huge rising name in pop music was 2012, where Bon Iver beat out J. Cole, Nicki Minaj, Skrillex and The Band Perry. Lightning strikes twice once in a while.

Brett Weiser-Schlesinger is a sophomore newspaper and online journalism major. He can be reached by email at bweisers@syr.edu or by Twitter at @brettws.

Published on December 8, 2015 at 11:46 pm