At this year's Grammy Awards on Feb. 2, the rock categories looked like a time capsule for another era. While awards in other genres went to rising stars such as Doechii, Chappell Roan and Sabrina Carpenter, the prize for best rock performance went to The Beatles. And the winner in 2025 for best rock album? The Rolling Stones.
Upon closer inspection, rock at the 67th annual Grammys seemed even more dated. The other rock award recipient, St. Vincent for best rock song, is no octogenarian, but she's nevertheless a familiar, multi-Grammy-winning presence at the ceremony, going back to her first win… a decade ago. As Stereogum noted, just two of the acts nominated for rock awards this year — UK band IDLES and Dublin-based Fontaines D.C. — released their debut albums in the past 20 years, and both are already second-time nominees in this category. And the other rock nominees are bands that have kept showing up again and again — like Green Day, The Black Keys and Pearl Jam, who have all been nominated over a dozen times.
In 2025, rock as a genre may not be much of a force commercially, but it remains vital creatively. Indie-label artists such as Mk.gee, Hurray for the Riff Raff and Jessica Pratt released rock or rock-adjacent albums last year that apparently didn't measure up to the — Googling quickly — 31st full-length by the Stones. On one level, the issue of the Recording Academy's approach to rock is as old as the Grammys, which started handing out awards in 1959 but didn't pick rock for album of the year until Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band at the 1968 ceremony. The current rock-specific categories are variations on awards first introduced only in the 1980s and 1990s. And while newer artists have been nominated across rock, including acts like Big Thief, The 1975 and Alabama Shakes in best rock song and best rock performance, the winners have historically tended toward legacy acts, especially in the album category — the first-ever winner, in 1995, was also the Stones. And as rock's popularity has waned, the categories seem all the more scattershot: Beck's decidedly un-rockin' Morning Phase won for best rock album in 2015. Rock categories have also been absent from the main telecast since Muse's win a year later, and despite wins for critics' darlings The War on Drugs and Paramore in the time since, best rock album has ever since been dominated by acts that have either been around for decades (Foo Fighters, Ozzy Osbourne, the Strokes in 2021) or sounded like they have (Greta Van Fleet, Cage the Elephant).
Still, even by Grammys standards, 2025's rock awards seemed particularly stale. To understand why, it might help to know how the voting works. To be eligible this cycle, recordings needed to be commercially released in the United States between Sept. 16, 2023, and Aug. 30, 2024, so a high-profile September rock release like MJ Lenderman's Manning Fireworks wouldn't qualify until 2026. Academy members and record labels submit entries, which experts in various areas review for eligibility and to be sure they are placed in the proper categories — no write-ins. The Academy's roughly 13,000 voting members, who are typically performers, songwriters, producers, and other music creators, then receive first-round ballots. Along with voting in the six "general fields" like song of the year and album of the year, they each may vote in up to 10 categories across up to three "genre fields," basically groupings of similar genres — rock, metal, and alternative are in one field, while rap and R&B are in another, and pop and "dance/electronic" are in a third. After nominees are announced, all voting members also receive the final ballot, where they may once again vote in up to 10 categories across up to three genre fields, plus the general fields. The Academy encourages members to vote in categories based on where they are active as peers. The number of entries in each category ranges into the hundreds.
The first unknown in all of this is how many voting members end up casting a ballot in each round. "Not all voting members vote, just like not all Americans vote for president, as we know," says Denise Barbarita, multiple Grammy–winning recording engineer and owner of the MONOLisa studio in Long Island City, Queens.
Also uncertain is how many voters — and which ones — happen to use their limited categories and genre fields to vote for rock in the first place. Several members who vote in the rock categories speculate that the genre's voters may represent an older cohort. Daniel Rowland, a Los Angeles-based music producer and engineer who has worked on Grammy-nominated releases, votes on different categories based on the genres he was working on in a given year. Rowland, who's 48, says he suspects the rock voters come from the genre's commercial heyday, while many of the younger Grammy voters may gravitate toward different genres such as rap or pop. "We just don't have an influx of new voters who are hip on what's going on in the rock categories," he suggests.
To be sure, awards are subjective, although some voters strain not to be. "I try not to let my personal taste get in the way," says Barbarita, a member of nearly a decade's standing who weighs in on the rock categories. She says she listens for the quality of the performance, songwriting and production. Academy rules say the rock awards recognize "artistic excellence," and Barbarita, who is 53 years old, dutifully combs through the thousands of entries submitted each year.
What's more, American popular culture isn't especially known for favoring seniority. When Killer Mike, then 48, swept the three rap categories at last year's Grammys, his victory speech — "You cannot tell me that you get too old," he exhorted — was a testament to the former rarity of hip-hop artists hitting their stride in middle age. The fact that The Beatles famously broke up more than 50 years ago doesn't mean its voter base is limited to fading nostalgists, either. Ricky Montgomery, a 31-year-old who was a first-time Grammy voter this year, cops to being among those who propelled The Beatles' "Now and Then" — which uses present-day technology to embellish a rough John Lennon solo demo — to best rock song glory. "The Beatles song, I happen to think, is still a good song," says the Los Angeles-based singer-songwriter. "This song was in every writer's room I went to the week it came out."
Other voters in rock and beyond cite a perception that the more famous names have an advantage. Boston-biased pianist Bruce Brubaker, a perennial Grammy voter who tends to abstain from the rock categories, says that even in his own classical realm, the performer with the most celebrity often wins. "It's name recognition," the 66-year-old guesses. "I fear that people are not necessarily listening to the music." James Treichler, an additional first-time voter, offers that while poring over hundreds of rock albums is still a big task, the availability of streaming links in today's ballots helps. "There's always going to be that popularity contest aspect, but I think this tries to remove that as much as possible," says the 43-year-old producer and engineer based in Champaign, Ill.
Confusion between the categories in the rock genre field could play a role, too. "Rock" in a Grammy context isn't specifically defined. "Alternative music," however, "is defined as a genre of music that embraces attributes of progression and innovation in both the music and attitudes associated with it," the official rules state. "It is often a less intense version of rock or a more intense version of pop and is typically regarded as more original, eclectic or musically challenging." Clearly, the two overlap, but where the line is drawn isn't always easy to discern.
St. Vincent, this year's winner for best rock song, also won for best alternative music album and best alternative music performance; other alternative nominees included Nick Cave, Kim Gordon and Brittany Howard. (Indie-rock supergroup and rare newcomers Boygenius likewise won across both rock and alternative in 2024.) "I've loved St. Vincent since high school, but is she representative of an alternative approach to music these days?" says Montgomery, one of the first-time voters. "I wouldn't say so." Grammy organizers' well-intentioned efforts to democratize the process may also limit any potential ability to curate a less legacy-bound list of rock nominees and winners. In 2021, after outcry when the Weeknd drew zero nominations despite his "Blinding Lights" being the year's biggest single, the Academy ended its nomination review committees, which had been meant as a form of checks and balances. Those now-defunct committees — the Grammys still have others in certain "craft" categories — at least compelled their members to listen, contends Chris Allgood, a mastering engineer who was nominated this year for his work with British jazz/R&B musician Jacob Collier. "It's not perfect," the 37-year-old allows, "but it's kind of like the Electoral College, right?"
Harvey Mason Jr., CEO of the Academy, says he can't comment on how many members actually vote in the rock categories or what their demographics might be, observing that access to such specifics is confined to the Grammys' accounting firm. But he maintains that who is nominated and who wins are both ultimately up to the voters. "What we want to continue to do is listen to the music community," he says. "This is an area that we continue to look at and we'll continue to look at going forward, for sure." Mason points to the Academy's ongoing efforts to keep its voting body, as he says, "refreshed and relevant and reflective of what's going on in music." In October, the organization announced that 66% of its electorate was new since 2019, as thousands of women and voting members of diverse backgrounds joined and some older members failed to requalify. "We won't always be accurate or reflective if we don't have participation," Mason says.
Whoever participates, it's hard to see rock standing resurgent at the Grammys without its reinvigoration as a mainstream, popular phenomenon. Unless a folk-country troubadour like Zach Bryan counts, not a single brand-new rock album released in 2024 ranked on the year-end Billboard 200 album chart. "The younger generation is just not that focused on rock," says Ed Gerrard, who in 2017 became the first music supervisor to win a Grammy. The 70-year-old's best rock album vote this year went to Jack White — yet another rocker whose recording career, with the White Stripes, dates back to the 20th century. But what counts as rock music in 2025, anyway? Particularly at the Grammys, where Foo Fighters have won best rock album five out of eight times, and rock-adjacent artists like Waxahatchee or Olivia Rodrigo place their albums in other categories, is rock perhaps being defined in such a limiting way that it's leaving younger artists or newer voices out, or alienating them from the very association?
Gerrard, also a long-time manager for artists such as Dr. John and Luther Vandross, adds that self-promotion is key to Grammy success. If labels are unwilling or unable to shell out for lavish billboards, then artists can at least visit the Academy's dozen chapters nationwide while on tour and introduce themselves. "It's kissing babies and shaking hands," Gerrard says.
Such politicking for institutional approval may sit uncomfortably with rock's rebellious origins. It certainly seems difficult to imagine Cindy Lee or Mount Eerie, to name two more of the rock-adjacent performers with lauded albums in 2024, barnstorming Music Row or Hollywood to curry favor with influential blocs. Ben Blackwell, a co-founder of Jack White's Third Man Records, detects something similar to the Grammys' rock stasis at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, where what he argues are "C- and D-level major-label bands" from the classic-rock era have been inducted ahead of worthier, or at least more famous, practitioners of later styles.
"I want folks to be able to enjoy the fruit of their labor," Blackwell, himself an Academy voting member, says of rock artists earning Grammy recognition. "But on the other hand, I keep reminding myself that the institutionalization of something that is countercultural is inherently fraught with deficiencies."
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