After four years of publicly refusing to engage with the Grammys, The Weeknd made his peace with the Recording Academy — and voters shut him out anyway, Rolling Stone reports, capping one of the strangest feuds in the awards' recent history with a shutout rather than a reconciliation trophy.

The reversal is real. The boy who once vowed never to submit his music again came back to the table. The nominations list, when it landed, did not include his name in a single category.

How the feud started

The rupture dates to November 2020, when the singer's blockbuster album After Hours and its record-breaking single "Blinding Lights" received zero nominations for the 2021 ceremony. He responded by announcing he would boycott the awards indefinitely, calling the process corrupt (the Rolling Stone headline frames the arc simply: he "made up with the Grammys, then got shut out again").

Since then, none of his releases have appeared on a Grammy ballot. The two sides spent years trading statements through the press.

What changed behind the scenes

The Recording Academy reworked parts of its process during the standoff, a familiar pattern when a high-profile artist challenges the institution. Rule changes and transparency measures followed criticism of how nomination review committees operated.

Those reforms, notably, did not translate into nominations for the artist whose complaints helped trigger them.

What does the shutout change?

For the race itself, not much on paper. The Weeknd wasn't a frontrunner in any category this cycle, so his absence doesn't reshuffle leaderboards the way a snubbed nominee would.

But symbolically, it's a pointed result. The Academy's most prominent critic extended an olive branch, entered the process again, and received nothing for it — a data point that will not be lost on other artists weighing whether cooperation with the Recording Academy pays off.

The optics problem

Awards bodies generally like closing public rifts with a gesture: a performance slot, an honorary acknowledgment, a nomination that signals the door is open. Here, the door opened and closed in the same motion.

The optics cut both ways. Voters may simply have preferred other work, and blocs (the informal clusters of voting members who rally around particular nominees) shift every cycle. Or the history weighed on the ballot.

Either way, the outcome is now the story.