Keznamdi Wins ‘Best Reggae Album’ At 2026 Grammy Awards
Jamaican singer Keznamdi has earned his first Grammy win, taking home Best Reggae Album for his sophomore album, BLXXD & FYAH , at the 2026 GRAMMY Awards.
The win was announced by presenter Dee Dee Bridgewater during the Premiere Ceremony at the Peacock Theater in Los Angeles on Sunday, February 1. It was Keznamdi’s first nomination.
“Reggae music has always been a music weh defend truths and rights, and African liberation and black man redemption,” Keznamdi said as he accepted the award.
He expressed gratitude to his mother and father, and his team. “We a represent Jamaican culture and Dancehall and Reggae,” he added.
Keznamdi topped an all-Jamaican field that included Lila Iké (nominated for Treasure Self Love), Vybz Kartel (First Week Out), Jesse Royal (No Place Like Home), and Mortimer (From Within).
The 13-track Blxxd & Fyah was released independently on August 22, 2025, with three of the songs featuring Kelissa, Mavado and Masicka, respectively.
Keznamdi McDonald was born in Kingston, Jamaica, into a musical family—his parents, Errol and Kerida McDonald, led the reggae group Chakula. His eldest sister, Kamila McDonald, is a fitness expert, Jamaican media personality, and former wife of Reggae singer Jah Cure. Another sister, Kelissa McDonald, is a singer and musician and the wife of Reggae star Chronixx.
While the world now celebrates Blxxd & Fyah as the Best Reggae Album of 2026, Keznamdi laid out the blueprint for this victory during a 2025 interview with DancehallMag.
“When you’re putting together a body of work, you want somebody able to play it from track one, go all the way down to the end without skipping it, you know. And for that you have to have a basket of fruits, you know, and have something on there for everybody,” he explained.
Added Keznamdi: “I would say there’s a there’s a huge global outlook as well on the project, where the overarching theme and the thread that threads everything together is the third world perspective and the struggle of, you know, living in a third world country and thinking so big and trying to overcome it.… being oppressed by the colonial minds and the colonial system that is still there, that’s still a grind.”
The ‘Best Reggae Album’ category was introduced at the 27th Annual GRAMMY Awards in 1985, originally under the title Best Reggae Recording. According to the Recording Academy, the award “recognizes excellence in albums of reggae music, including roots reggae, dancehall and ska music.”
Nominations are bestowed on “albums containing greater than 75% playing time of new reggae recordings.” Additionally, the winning album’s featured artists, producers, and engineers are also eligible for the award if they contributed to more than 50% of play time on the project.
The inaugural award went to Black Uhuru for Anthem.
Since then, the category has been largely dominated by male artists, including Stephen Marley, who holds the record for the most wins (8), Ziggy Marley (7), and Damian ‘Jr. Gong’ Marley, who earned his fourth win in the category for executive producing Kabaka Pyramid’s The Kalling . Collectively, the Marley family accounts for 15 of the 41 Best Reggae Album Grammys awarded since the category’s inception.
In recent years, winners have included Bob Marley: One Love – Music Inspired by the Film (2025), Julian Marley and Antaeus’ Colors of Royal (2024), Kabaka Pyramid’s The Kalling (2023), SOJA’s Beauty in the Silence (2022), Toots & the Maytals’ Got to Be Tough (2021), and Koffee‘s Rapture (2020).