Exclusive | Inside Megan Thee Stallion's Grammys 2021 afterparty

New album. New record label. Newfound artistic freedom. And another round of Grammys success? Megan Thee Stallion recently released her third studio album, “Megan,” on her own independent Hot Girl label following a lengthy dispute with former record company 1501 Certified Entertainment. But it has been a while since she made an impact at music’s highest-profile awards ceremony. Will this be her comeback?

Megan Thee Stallion has been releasing music since 2017, but she achieved a mainstream breakthrough with her 2019 mixtape “Fever” and then her 2020 EP “Suga.” That included her first number-one single on the Billboard Hot 100, “Savage,” which shot to the top thanks to a remix featuring Beyonce. That brought her to the Grammys in 2021, where she won three awards: Best Rap Performance and Best Rap Song for “Savage,” and Best New Artist for her body-ody-ody of work that year. The only category she lost was Record of the Year.

That begs the question, though: why has it been so hard for her to get back in the Grammys’ good graces? In 2022 she received two more nominations: Best Rap Performance for “Thot Shit” and Album of the Year as a featured artist on Lil Nas X‘s album “Montero.” But that’s it. She has been releasing music consistently since her Grammy wins, but her first two studio albums, “Good News” and “Traumazine,” were entirely ignored by the recording academy, even in rap categories. Perhaps there’s some gender bias at play: no solo woman won Best Rap Album, for instance, until Cardi B‘s “Invasion of Privacy” in 2019, and no woman has been nominated for the award since.

Megan Thee Stallion Wins a Grammy for Best New Artist - The New York Times

It’s certainly not an issue of quality. “Good News” and “Traumazine” were both critically acclaimed, scoring 85 and 80 on MetaCritic, respectively. Megan hasn’t really had a problem commercially either. Both of those albums debuted in the top five on the Billboard 200, “Good News” went platinum and “Traumazine” was certified gold, and both of them produced multiple top-40 hits on the Hot 100. So what’s keeping the recording academy from getting back in the Megan Thee Stallion business, and will this be the album that puts her back in the limelight?