The Grammys have received a substantial amount of backlash in recent years for their alleged rigged and undeserving Grammy nominations and, especially, wins.This year, breakout star Billie Eilish swept up wins for all four main categories: Record Of The Year, Album Of The Year, Song Of The Year, and Best New Artist. Although this may be a huge triumph for the teen sensation, it should also be a huge point of concern for her career.

Best New Artist is an award that comes with notable controversy because of its supposed curse, it has been labeled as a career killing nomination. Those who receive the award don’t necessarily fall off the map, in fact some huge names have taken home the award like Cyndi Lauper and legend Amy Winehouse. However, those who have received the award historically hit career lows afterwards. As elaborated by Sheldon Rocha Leal of Medium, there are four categories of fate that seem to follow Best New Artist winners: “One time winners,” “Multiple wins at debut ceremony,” “Long Wait Between Wins,” and “Tragic Post Grammy Careers.” This could possibly spell trouble for Eilish as she would fall under the “Multiple wins at debut ceremony” category. Not only was the 2020 Grammys Eilish’s first year of nomination, but her presence on the music scene is still fairly new with her debut EP Don’t Smile At Me releasing in August of 2017 and her debut album When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? releasing in March of 2019.

Other artists who won Best New Artist and received multiple awards at their debut ceremony are Hootie & The Blowfish, Evanescence, and Fun. All of these names you may recognize, but ever since their initial wins they were never nominated again and frankly are only known for one track like “We Are Young and “Bring Me To Life.” Eilish may be able to escape a similar fate because she has managed to become largely successful in a small amount of time and she also has more than one recognizable song like “when the party’s over” and “you should see me in a crown.” On the flip side, she may have more than one recognizable song, but her only big hit is “Bad Guy” which peaked at number 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 and has clung to the charts for 43 weeks, but besides that, she has no massively successful tracks.

Her debut album did extremely well being the number 1 most streamed album of 2019 on Spotify, however this doesn’t mean much as Taylor Swift’s reputation was the highest selling album of 2017, but received no Grammy wins. The Grammys have been accused of not giving artists the credit they deserve like this for quite some time with the Recording Academy’s former president Deborah Dugan fueling these allegations stating that Swift’s “Lover” was “supposed to win at the 2020 Grammy Awards for Song Of The Year, but is replaced by another song because she (Swift) exposed the dirty politics of the industry…”

Swift’s loss for “Lover’ isn’t what has fans riled up this award season though, the point of controversy has been Eilish winning Album Of The Year for When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? over Ariana Grande’s thank u, next. This raises another point of concern as it has caused an uproar on Twitter of people criticizing Eilish for an album win they don’t think she deserves. Eilish herself was even caught on camera saying “please don’t be me” before her name was announced for the win and then stating, “can I just say that I think Ariana deserves this” during her acceptance speech. It’s not entirely clear if the surge of hate is from fans wanting Grande to have won instead or if they genuinely don’t believe Eilish’s album was worthy, but either way this could taint Eilish’s career as fans still haven’t gotten over Lorde’s loss for Album Of The Year at the 60th Grammys to Bruno Mars.

Whether Eilish will stay afloat after this year’s Grammy Award ceremony is uncertain. She is lucky to have cermonuted that amount of success she has this early on in her career, but fans tend to hold grudges very easily in the case of Grammy wins and snubs. She has also been accused of making music that sounds all too similar which can be damaging to a career such as Lana Del Rey, who has been accused of the same issue. Truthfully, only time can tell what is to become of Eilish’s career, but at the current moment she should be at least somewhat concerned.