were the favorites to take home the Album of the Year at the 2013 Grammy Awards, and the oddsmakers were right: Babel earned top honors Sunday night (February 10), beating out the Black Keys (El Camino), Fun. (Some Nights), Frank Ocean (Channel Orange) and underdog Jack White (Blunderbuss).
Last year's big winner, Adele, gave out the Golden Gramophone to the English rock band, whose Babel topped the Billboard albums chart after being released in September, landing the biggest sales debut of 2012 and pushing more than 600,000 copies.
The band humbly gave props to the Black Keys, who beat them for a number of rock awards, and saluted fellow Brit Adele.
On Friday, oddsmaking experts at Bovada called the Album of the Year winner, making Babel a 2/5 favorite in the category.
"They delivered incredible music for a second time ... and the work that was done, it's very empowering and shows a lot of confidence when a band goes out for almost two months playing new music from the new album for their fans and shares it with them and makes the fan experience so wonderful and inclusive," Daniel Glass, CEO of Glassnote, the label that put out Babel, told last year.
Frank Ocean, who had just finished performing his Channel Orange track "Forrest Gump," waited backstage as the Album of the Year winner was announced, but he didn't go home empty-handed, capturing two of the six awards he was nominated for.