The race for the 2023 GRAMMY Awards is becoming tight as ever as predictions for the highly-awaited list of nominees have been emerging here and there since the eligibility period closed weeks ago.
One of the strongest contenders for the Big four categories is Kendrick Lamar's "Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers."
Hailed as one of the biggest opening weeks for an album this year, Lamar's fifth record asserted its dominance since it debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 charts.
Recent predictions, in this case, Billboard puts "Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers" as one of the five shoo-ins for the Album of the Year Category - going against Adele's "30," Harry Styles' "Harry's House," Beyonce's "Renaissance," and Bad Bunny's "Un Verano Sin Ti."
Out of the five, Lamar's is the only hip-hop album to be a shoo-in for GRAMMY's biggest award.
Should the album be nominated, it would be the rapper's fourth album to be nominated for Album of the Year, tieing with Kanye West for most of any rapper so far, but if he wins, this will mark as his first.
According to Hits Daily Double, Kendrick Lamar's double album is not the only item poised for a huge GRAMMY win. One of his bonus songs from the album, "The Heart Pt. 5," is also a tough act to beat on Record and Song of the Year and Best Rap Song.
Despite the track only hitting No. 15 on the Billboard Hot 100, "The Heart Pt. 5" has met widespread critical acclaim - Pitchfork even crowned it as Best New Track, noting how Lamar's awarded lyricism mixed with the deepfakes of the music video, visualizes "a complicated lineage through Blackness and the pressures of celebrity."
Meanwhile, The Guardian says the track was "a heartstopping call for uplifted humanity," as Kendrick's flow was "as charged and acute as ever as he lays out a manifesto of radical empathy."
"Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers" debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 charts, opening at 295k album-equivalent units. It became Apple Music's largest first-day stream of the year, with more than 60 million streams. The 18-track double album was released by his own label, pgLang, and on Top Dawg Entertainment, as his last album for the label.
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