Leading the way with 11 total nominations is Kendrick Lamar and his album To Pimp A Butterfly. But Taylor Swift racked up seven nominations, including three out of the four biggest categories — Album of the Year, Record of the Year and Song of the Year. But R&B singer, songwriter and producer The Weeknd matched Swift’s total tally.

For those looking for a “Swift vs. Lamar” narrative, however, things aren’t so simple: the Best Pop Group/Duo Performance and Best Music Video nominees include their collaboration “Bad Blood.” (Lamar also has another nominated video in the latter category, for his anthemic “Alright.”)

Especially among the four major categories — Album of the Year, Record of the Year, Song of the Year and Best New Artist — many of the nominees were nearly a forgone conclusion, considering the rapturous response they’ve already received from critics and fans alike.

Nominees for Album of the Year are Alabama Shakes‘ Sound & Color; Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp A Butterfly; Traveller, by Chris Stapleton; Taylor Swift’s 1989; and The Weeknd‘s Beauty Behind the Madness.

The Song of the Year prize is a songwriting award. This year’s nominated songs are Kendrick Lamar’s “Alright,” Taylor Swift’s “Blank Space,” Little Big Town‘s “Girl Crush,” Wiz Khalifa‘s “See You Again” and Ed Sheeran‘s “Thinking Out Loud.”

The Record of the Year award is what fans are likely to think of as the vote for the year’s best single. This year’s nominees: D’Angelo and the Vanguard’s “Really Love”; “Uptown Funk” by Mark Ronson, featuring Bruno Mars; Ed Sheeran’s “Thinking Out Loud”; Taylor Swift’s “Blank Space”; and The Weeknd’s “Can’t Feel My Face.”

The Best New Artist category was a little more of a stylistic grab bag, with the nominees including Australian singer-songwriter Courtney Barnett, English singer-songwriter James Bay, country artist Sam Hunt, former American Idol contestant Tori Kelly and pop star Meghan Trainor.

Even so, certain artists may be surprised by their omission from this year’s roster altogether. For example, Rihanna‘s single “FourFiveSeconds,” featuring Paul McCartney and Kanye West, would have seemed tailor-made for Grammy judges who generally love cross-genre — and perhaps even more importantly, trans-generational — collaborations. In fact, the trio even performed the song at last year’s televised Grammy ceremony. However, Rihanna failed to receive any nominations at all this year.

The odd timing of the Grammy schedule also means that this year’s monster-hit album — Adele‘s freshly issued 25 — won’t be eligible for nomination until the awards’ 2017 edition. In order to qualify for the 58th annual awards, recordings must have been released between Oct. 1, 2014 and Sept. 30, 2015.

The Grammy Awards are voted on by members of NARAS, the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences. The full list of nominees, across all 83 categories, is available on NARAS’ website.

Copyright 2015 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

All photos by Kyle Gustafson.

Francy Graham didn’t mean to create an homage to Kendrick Lamar with “My Vibe,” a previously unreleased track from her now-defunct punk band, Dudes. But that’s kind of what she did.

Graham, who also plays in Chain & the Gang, says she probably heard Lamar’s 2012 track “Bitch, Don’t Kill My Vibe” at some point — but she didn’t really take the time to listen to it until deciding to release this track from her band.

“Of course I’ve like, been at a party, and heard it and stuff, but I’d never really sat down and listened to it. And so I did,” says Graham. “I mean, [Dudes’ version is] pretty similar. I just think it’s adapted to my lifestyle, I guess.”

At their core, both songs are about self-preservation in the face of undesirable forces, but the Dudes track is a stripped down punk anthem, with Graham’s slightly sardonic vocals topping a bare-bones bass line (played by Luke Reddick, who usually handled drums) and beat (from Laurie Spector, who usually played bass). Graham says she wrote the lyrics during a chill jam session; she remembers Reddick saying “bitch, don’t kill my vibe” and she decided to run with it.

“In my head I was like ‘Wow, my vibe, I just got this great idea that no one’s ever come up with,'” Graham says. “But, like, everyone’s done that.”

Graham’s lyrics bring a different sensibility to her band’s song, too. There are not-so-subtle digs at that kind of art-school, too-cool culture: “Sea punk, art school, goth you’re so lost/I don’t care, just don’t kill my vibe.”

Graham says she wrote the lyrics while beginning college at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. “Moving to Baltimore was kind of a shock for me because there were all these people who were trying to figure themselves out and who were so happy to be out of their parents’ house,” Graham writes in an email. They “were trying to act all crazy, and I just felt more independent, and less of a need to be like, ‘Waaaghhhh, lets be crazy!'”

The musician would prefer that those people not, you know, kill her vibe.

“My Vibe” remained unreleased for a variety of reasons, including the disintegration of Dudes itself (“We’re kind of all in different places right now,” Graham says) and fear of negative reactions to the song. Eventually, Graham realized she couldn’t do anything about potential backlash, and she liked the song too much to let it disappear.

Dudes recorded the track in April 2014, in the basement studio of Coup Sauvage and The Snips‘ Jason Barnett. For a while, Graham thought of an alternative way of releasing “My Vibe” — she had a feeling it might make a good match for a vibrator commercial, and she even considered contacting a pleasure-piece manufacturer. She hasn’t yet, but there’s still time.

Lamar took nearly two and half years to make his new record, an eternity in pop time. But once To Pimp a Butterfly arrived on Sunday night — nine days ahead of the announced release date — it’s easy to see where he put all that time. He doesn’t just live up to outsized expectations, he upends them with an ambitious effort to craft the musical equivalent to the Great American Novel.

Like Lamar’s native Los Angeles, To Pimp a Butterfly feels both dense and sprawling with its panoply of ideas, styles and sounds. Backing the rapper is a young cohort of L.A.’s best beat makers and musicians, including Digi+Phonics, Terrace Martin and Thundercat. Their collaboration creates songs-within-songs that hold multitudes, from updated P-Funk romps (“King Kunta”) to coffee-shop poetry slams (“For Free?”) to tete-a-tetes with ghosts (“Mortal Man”).

To Pimp a Butterfly doesn’t remind me of other contemporary hip-hop albums so much as the musicals of Melvin Van Peebles. Both that playwright and this rapper invite us into noisy conversations between eclectic characters debating personal triumphs and social failures, black love and white hate, all under the looming shadow of America.

It’s telling that two of the album’s songs are simply titled “u” and “i,” but don’t confuse that for a universal “we.” Lamar wades into our moment of peril around race, inequality and brutality, but he’s not speaking to the rest of the nation as much as penning both an admonishment of, and love letter to, Black America. That’s the “we” he sets himself both above and below, and yet always within.

Copyright 2015 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.