Margo Price and Kelsea Ballerini will find out on Feb. 1 if they win a Grammy for best country album.
They could both win, since a new awards lineup means they’re not actually competing against each other.
This year marks the first time that the country album category has been split into two separate styles. Thus, Price is in the running for best traditional country album for Hard Headed Woman, while Ballerini is among the final five with Patterns in the parallel best contemporary country album list.
“Other genres have subgenres; I don’t know why we can’t,” says songwriter Trannie Anderson, up for best country song as one of four writers on Lainey Wilson’s “Somewhere Over Laredo.” “I think it really just broadens the reach in celebration of our genre. Country’s cool again.”
The size of the total Grammy slate seemingly evolves on an annual basis — in the most dramatic example it shrunk by 31 categories in 2011 — but this year, that country album alteration is the only change on the ballot, which currently features 95 total awards. That made the topic ripe for a conspiracy theory, and one emerged that suggests that the Recording Academy reacted to anger over Beyoncé’s best country album win a year ago with Cowboy Carter, a project that engendered significant debate over what does and does not fit the definition of country music.
“Not knocking Beyoncé,” says Jenee Fleenor, an in-demand fiddler who’s up for best country song as a co-writer on the Miranda Lambert/Chris Stapleton collaboration “A Song to Sing.” “I think we’re all trying to find our footing with all of that. [The extra category] seems appropriate. There’s so much country music to celebrate, I think there’s room for all.”
Fleenor essentially put her finger on the Academy’s thinking, though Cowboy Carter’s 2025 victory, which came just four months before the category’s update was announced, created some “unique timing,” as Grammy Trustee Fletcher Foster puts it.
“When something like this passes in the same year that an artist wins in that category, there’s going to be questions,” Academy CEO Harvey Mason Jr. allows. “But I can assure you, from where I sit, and the conversations that I’ve been a part of and the discussions in the board room with our elected leadership, that this is by no means a reaction to that. It’s something that’s been in the works.”
In reality, the country album split is a development that’s taken more than 15 years to come to fruition. The Academy first established an award for best Americana album in 2010, at a time when that genre was weighted more heavily toward traditional country acts. Americana has since widened, while modern, mainstream country has increasingly embraced other music genres. Florida Georgia Line successfully incorporated hip-hop elements as far back as 2012, and other acts have similarly blended country with other styles: HARDY paired it with hard rock, Dan + Shay mixed it with complex pop sounds, and Jelly Roll’s used lyrical messaging — plus his duet with Brandon Lake — to fuse country with Christian music.
All of those changes left “a space between country music and Americana,” Foster says.
As a result, the Academy’s country constituents became more vocal three to five years ago, lobbying for an additional country category. The Academy has procedures for those efforts — proposals are written, votes are held, and several rounds of super-majorities are required to institute a new category.
Other genres already made distinctions between traditional and contemporary/progressive categories, including pop, R&B and blues. So realistically, separating traditional and contemporary country albums wasn’t particularly a stretch. It actually reflected the increasing fungibility between styles of every stripe.
“Genres are changing so quickly,” Mason says. “Things are coming together, genres are blending, new things are cropping up, global music is happening. So we’re going to have to be very diligent about our awards and our categories, because of all the change and evolution happening in the way music is made, the way people are creating it and collaboratively, the way it’s coming out from different places around the globe.”
The best way to understand the effect of the category change is to compare last year’s country album menu to this year’s offerings. Beyoncé’s competition in 2025 included Post Malone’s F-1 Trillion, Kacey Musgraves’ Deeper Well, Chris Stapleton’s Higher and Wilson’s Whirlwind. It was basically two traditionally non-country artists experimenting with the genre alongside three of country’s well-established figures.
This year’s traditional country album category makes room for Charley Crockett’s Dollar a Day, Lukas Nelson’s American Romance, Willie Nelson’s Oh What a Beautiful World, Price’s Hard Headed Woman and Zach Top’s Ain’t in it for my Health.
Best contemporary country album offers Ballerini’s Patterns, Tyler Childers’ Snipe Hunter, Eric Church’s Evangeline vs. the Machine, Jelly Roll’s Beautifully Broken and Lambert’s Postcards from Texas.
Combined, those 10 finalists do a much better job of spanning the stylistic breadth of country than the five releases on the list a year ago.
“Certainly, as a listener, you’d have to be silly to not notice that there’s a difference in the sounds,” says songwriter of the year nominee Laura Veltz, supporting this year’s expansion.
Ultimately, the Beyoncé conspiracy theory is intriguing at first glance, but not particularly plausible, given the pace at which the Academy’s decisions get made. But even if the Academy had split the country album category in reaction to Cowboy Carter, it’s still a victory for artists moving forward.
“A new category means five new people get nominated,” Mason says. “How is that a bad thing?”
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