2025 Grammy Nominees for Song of the Year: The Biggest Tracks in the Running

The 2025 Grammy nominations for Song of the Year tell the story of where pop, rap, and R&B stand right now. It’s a year where the past and future collide, where icons team up, where storytelling cuts sharper than ever, and where the biggest song of the summer may also be its pettiest. There are no afterthoughts here—every track is a statement, a challenge, or a flex. 

The Dark Horses and the Certified Hits

Shaboozey’s “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” is the kind of unexpected country-rap crossover that Nashville pretends to be above until the charts tell them otherwise. A perfect hybrid of genre rebellion and party-starting charisma, it taps into the honky-tonk TikTok culture that makes country feel thrilling again. It’s no shock that it landed a Song of the Year nod—if anything, it’s proof that country’s future is in the hands of those willing to shake up its past.

Then there’s Chappell Roan’s “Good Luck, Babe!,” a synth-pop anthem that wears its heartbreak like sequins. The track could easily have been one of the great should-have-beens of the year, but Roan’s meteoric rise and the song’s undeniable, shimmering tragedy ensured it a deserved spot among the nominees. It’s a track built for screaming on the dancefloor, for leaving your mascara on someone else’s shoulder. Even if it doesn’t win, it’s the kind of song that will stick around for decades, growing in status until people forget it ever lost.

The Heavyweights: Swift, Lamar, and Beyoncé

Taylor Swift’s “Fortnight” featuring Post Malone is both classic and calculated. It’s Swift at her most cinematic, drenched in longing, produced to feel like a memory half-forgotten. Post Malone, the patron saint of the deeply hungover, lends the track a strange, aching quality that’s more effective than it has any right to be. With Jack Antonoff on board, this nomination was inevitable, though whether it has the raw emotional weight to take the prize remains to be seen.

If Swift's track is a whisper, Kendrick Lamar's “Not Like Us” is a megaphone. Easily the most urgent and venomous song in the category, it might also be the most thrilling. The fact that a diss track is up for Song of the Year tells you everything about Lamar’s dominance. “Not Like Us” didn’t just take over hip-hop—it was a full-scale cultural moment, a reminder that rap’s best don’t just make hits; they make history.

Then there’s Beyoncé’s “TEXAS HOLD 'EM,” which sees her turn country music into something that feels less like a return to roots and more like a revolution. With Raphael Saadiq among the songwriters, the track is steeped in groove, a country song only in texture but unmistakably Beyoncé in execution. It’s swaggering, playful, and expertly crafted. And like all things Beyoncé, it’s here to win.

The Ballad, the Banger, and the Left Turn

Billie Eilish’s “BIRDS OF A FEATHER” is delicate in all the ways that Billie Eilish is, but beneath the softness, there’s an insistence, a quiet forcefulness that feels different this time. She and Finneas have mastered their formula, and the result is a song that lingers like perfume on the collar of someone you swore you’d never text again. Whether that’s enough to take home the award remains to be seen, but it’s undeniable that she belongs here.

Lady Gaga and Bruno Mars teaming up for “Die With A Smile” feels like an experiment that shouldn’t work but somehow does. The songwriting lineup alone looks like someone hit shuffle on a list of Grammy winners, but the result is cinematic, anthemic, and dripping in old-school glamour. It’s a song that seems genetically engineered to play over the credits of a blockbuster that leaves audiences in tears. Whether that’s enough to win against the more immediately culture-shifting nominees is another question.

And then there’s Sabrina Carpenter’s “Please Please Please,” which wields its desperation like a weapon. Co-written with Amy Allen and Jack Antonoff, it’s catchy in a way that feels like a trap, sweet but edged with poison. Carpenter has spent the last year proving that she’s more than a pop princess; this nomination is proof she’s winning.

With a field this stacked, predicting a winner feels impossible. Swift and Lamar are the obvious frontrunners, but history has shown that the Grammys love an underdog as much as they love an icon. No matter who takes the trophy, this year's nominees represent the best of what pop music can be—urgent, unforgettable, and impossible to ignore.