And the results are in! The red carpet was rolled out on February 1st for the 2026 Grammy Awards, which featured nearly 100 categories celebrating the best in music. From songwriting to performing to engineering, the best of the best showed up to the Crypto.com Arena in downtown Los Angeles to celebrate the year’s accomplishments.
The awards are broken down by genre, such as “Best Rock Album” or “Best Jazz Performance,” but the highest honors are held for the six awards in the General field: Record of the Year, Album of the Year, Song of the Year, Best New Artist, Producer of the Year, and Songwriter of the Year.
Kendrick Lamar garnered the most nods this year with nominations in nine categories, but he scored big with Record of the Year for his song “luther” featuring SZA.
It may seem like this category is about an album, but it’s about a single recording. It is also separate from Song of the Year, as the Recording Academy defines Record of the Year as “a specific recording of a song and recognizes the Artists, Producers and Engineers who contribute to that recording.” Song of the Year, on the other hand, deals with the composition and recognizes the songwriters.
“luther” also won the Grammy for Best Melodic Rap Performance.
Lamar released the song as the third single from his album “GNX,” and it quickly took off. It spent 13 weeks at the top of the Billboard Hot 100 and currently has over 1.3 billion streams on Spotify. With those stats, it’s clear the Grammy win was a culmination of momentum rather than a surprise. This also marks his second consecutive Record of the Year award and makes him the most-awarded rapper in Grammy history with 27 wins, as Variety reports.
So, what makes “luther” feel like that inevitable hit?
The song heavily features a sample of Luther Vandross and Cheryl Lynn’s 1982 duet, “If This World Were Mine,” which is itself a cover of Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell’s song. Lamar even named the song after Vandross.
“Luther Vandross is one of my favorite artists of all time,” he said during his acceptance speech. “They granted us the privilege to do our version of it. When we got that clearance, we all dropped a tear because we know how much him and Cheryl Lynn put into it. Being able to put our vocals on it, it proves that we were somewhat worthy to be as great them. They granted us that.”
The song also opens with the same chord progression: DMaj7, GMaj7, F#min7, GMaj7. It then spins off into its own song, though the arrangement keeps an extra 2/4 bar after the line “If this world were…” to build a beautiful suspense. The blend of Lamar and SZA’s voices creates a wonderful texture that’s enriched by orchestral swells. The R&B love song vibe is grounded by rhythmic hi-hats and 808s to create one of the most serene hip-hop songs of all time.
Check out nikilately‘s clean and simple arrangement of the song, or get the official Hal Leonard arrangement.
