The “Best New Artist” category at the Grammys was never known for actually honoring “new” artists. Every year, when nominees are announced, the inevitable reaction of “But wait, I’ve been listening to this band for over a decade, they’re not new at all!” sends ripples across social media, and when the 2025 list of potential winners came out, the discourse was no different.
Fans of the new-age pop princess Sabrina Carpenter, one of the inclusions in the category, noted that they’ve been following her music career since the release of her debut album in 2015. Even Victoria Monét, last year’s winner, had been releasing music nine years prior to her nomination.
But the inclusion I was the most mystified by was Khruangbin, an indie-psych fusion band that has been making gentle but noticeable waves with their dubby, ethereal music for the past ten years. The only thing I could ask was, “How is the Recording Academy just now catching wind of them?”
Khruangbin has been great for a lot longer than one year
On the one hand, I’m happy that Khruangbin was finally receiving the recognition that they’ve always deserved for the better half of a decade, but I still felt that the category they were included in was a bit discrediting. According to the Grammys website, artists are eligible for a “Best New Artist” nomination if they “achieved a breakthrough into the public consciousness and impacted the musical landscape during the year's eligibility period.”
This contextualizes the inclusion of artists like Chappell Roan—this year’s winner—and Sabrina Carpenter, two artists who, despite having been in the game for a number of years, informed the 2024 pop culture conversation with their memorable festival performances, chart-dominating singles and unavoidable viral moments (i.e. Roan’s TikTok rant about being mistreated and stalked by her own fans).
Khruangbin did put out a relatively successful album this year—the sanguine and stripped-back A La Sala—which peaked at number 38 on the Billboard charts. But was this truly their biggest year, the one that broke them through into public consciousness the way that being a “Best New Artist” requires them to? Looking back at their history and some of their earlier career-defining years, if this was always the criteria—they should have been hailed in this category a long time ago.
Formed in Houston, Texas, in 2010, Khurangbin is the trio of vocalist/bassist Laura Lee, vocalist/guitarist Mark Speer, and drummer DJ Johnson. They put out their debut album, The Universe Smiles Upon You, five years later, a 10-song journey filled with hypnotic grooves, celestial vocal improvisations, and dreamy jams.
It blended the band’s Latin influences with deep psychedelia and tender indie rock, and it garnered the attention of well-known acts like Father John Misty and Massive Attack—who invited them on tour as openers that following year.
Throughout the later 2010s and early 2020s, Khruangbin steadily built up their musical resume while garnering a soft-spoken yet passionate following. The band went on to release three more full-length albums before 2024’s A La Sala, and put out two EPs with Texas soul singer Leon Bridges in 2020—Texas Sun and Texas Moon—the projects that made me fall in love with the band.
Their masterfully blissful track “Texas Sun” still remains their most streamed song on Spotify, with over 300 million plays; in comparison, their second most popular song, “People Everywhere (Still Alive),” has nearly 136 million. This collaboration with Bridges, who was riding his own wave of success following his 2016 debut Coming Home, spearheaded the trio into the mainstream, and their work on Texas Sun got them a Number 1 spot on Billboard’s “Emerging Artists” chart in 2020.
If they were “emerging” five years ago, why must they still be considered “breaking through” in 2025? How much more do they need to bolster their resume before they’re finally on par with the other established indie rock artists that get spots in categories like “Best Alternative Music Album” and “Alternative Music Performance?”
If I had to choose an emerging indie rock band to have swapped Khruangbin out for, it would have been Fontaines D.C., the Irish rock band that has been nominated in the Rock category since their second album, A Hero’s Death, got them a “Best Rock Album” spot in 2021. While the band has been consistently putting out well-performing albums, 2024’s Romance propelled them into popularity and earned them some of their highest chart rankings ever.
As a younger band who have broken into the spotlight during the 2020s and is riding its most successful album rollout yet, a nomination in this spot—by its own definition—made better sense for an artist following Fontaines D.C.’s timeline. Within the “Best New Artists” category, where Khruangbin was up against acts that were so inherently “2024,” it kind of felt like they were doomed to get snubbed from the very beginning.
If they were included in 2021’s lineup, following a year where they had more standout achievements from the previous 12 months to contribute to the cultural conversation, perhaps they would have had a better chance.
On the bright side, Khruangbin has never been a band that holds weight to the ways that the mainstream recognizes them. In fact, they consciously hide their private lives and true appearances—letting their textural music speak for them completely. Both Lee and Speer wear long, jet-black wigs during performances and public appearances—which they donned during their all-too-short set slot during the Grammys live ceremony.
In a 2022 interview with Vanity Fair, Lee claimed that she has only been recognized in public a number of times—including when an older couple in a Madrid restaurant clocked her merely by a tiny finger tattoo. I’ve found myself wondering if this major moment in the national spotlight would erase this secrecy for them, and that maybe skipping out on the win elicited sighs of relief from a band that relishes in their privacy.
Of course, I wish that Khruangbin took home a golden gramophone, but at the end of the day, a Grammy nomination is a Grammy nomination no matter what the category is. I am still ecstatic that the Recording Academy is finally catching on to the unspoken greatness of Khruangbin’s otherworldly sound. Maybe one day they will rethink the parameters of the “Best New Artist” category since I was far from the only listener to call out its confusing qualifications this year.