FEATURE:
On Safe Ground
2022, SOS, and the Return of the Spellbinding SZA
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I hate it when…
journalists say an artist has ‘returned’ as they brought out a single or album after a few years ago. They have not hibernated or gone missing. Instead, it is how a career works. You will not get artists releasing music all the time so, to have this grand term applied to someone doing their job seems a bit much! That said, there is something about SZA’s SOS that seemed like a bit of a return. Her fabulous 2017 debut, CTRL, was among the best albums of the last decade. You can only imagine the sort of expectation that has occurred since. There has been a bit of a build-up to SOS. SZA did suggest the album could be out in 2020 but, with delays and various issues, that didn’t actually happen. I know that aggravated some fans. As the pandemic had just kicked in, maybe it was not the best year to release music! An icon of her age, SOS did come to shore on 9th December. Not many huge albums are released in December. It was a treat at the end of last year – also marking the release of an album that had all this press and hype. Normally, when you get that sort of delay and sense of what could be, the reality is a little less than expected. I think people build up in their heads something unrealistic. That is not the case with SZA. The Missouri-born artist has released the best album of her career! Number one in the U.S. and two in the U.K., I love the title and cover of the album.
It does seem to depict a sense of peril or precariousness. With a range of producers working alongside Solána Rowe (SZA), SOS is a masterpiece! It is wonderful to have this amazing artist putting out music. Let’s hope that we do not have a five-year gap between this and the third album. There was some press around SOS. I will come to some critical reviews for an album that appeared in a few end of year lists – in spite of the fact many had already been written! COMPLEX featured SZA is a magnificent cover story. She talked about SOS and where her music is now:
“I appreciate [my fans] patience, but constantly trying to people-please and fulfill expectations instead of just thinking about what you need can deter you from your true path. And the next thing you know you're somebody that you never signed up to be,” she says. “Even with this album, I just wanna be better than my last project to myself. I wanna be a better writer. I wanna be a better artist, musician… a better thinker. I just wanna do things that make myself proud and interested.”
SZA has always been determined to be better. Born in St. Louis, she moved to Maplewood, New Jersey, a suburb about 45 minutes outside of New York City, at 10 years old. She described Maplewood as a predominantly Jewish and white community that was “quietly affluent but more lowkey.” Therefore, more often than not she was the token Black girl, which conditioned her to be competitive, but mostly with herself. She grew up in a strict, conservative household practicing Islam and wearing modest clothes. Her father was a CNN producer who was Muslim and her mother was an executive at AT&T who was Catholic. She dedicated most of her energy to sports, spending 13 years as a gymnast, becoming the captain of her team, and ranking as the fifth best gymnast in the U.S. when she was a sophomore in high school. But after realizing she wouldn’t make it to the Olympics she stopped. “If I can't win, then I don't play,” she told Nylon in 2017. Post high school (fun fact: SZA attended the same high school as Lauryn Hill 15 years after Hill graduated) she hopped from college to college pursuing majors like broadcast journalism and marine biology before dropping out all together and working odd jobs that included bartending at a strip club and selling makeup at Sephora.
PHOTO CREDIT: Jacob Webster
Her music diet growing up was jazz her father favored, but thanks to her older sister, a mixtape she received at a bar mitzvah, and an iPod she found at a gymnastics camp, she was introduced to a wide swath of sounds ranging from Björk to Wu-Tang to LFO to Lil Jon. She started singing on records when her brother, a rapper named Manhattan, asked her to get on a few of his songs. After that, making music became a hobby. But it was her part-time job for streetwear brand 10.Deep that brought her closer to the career she didn’t even know she wanted. 10.Deep was sponsoring Kendrick Lamar’s 2011 CMJ show, and SZA delivered clothes to Lamar and other TDE members. She brought along a friend, who was listening to SZA’s music on her headphones. Her friend was so engaged in the music that Punch asked to listen. Over the next two years SZA would send Punch music until she officially signed to TDE in 2013 as its first female artist.
SZA’s three EPs that preceded Ctrl showcased a singer experimenting with elusive sounds and abstract concepts, but Ctrl was more concrete. Serving as the ultimate coming-of-age project, the album pulled from many genres, but it was SZA’s vulnerable, fluid, and adept songwriting that stole the show. The album was certified platinum a year after its release and garnered her five Grammy nominations, and a remarkable performance at the award show. And in Ctrl’s wake artists like Summer Walker, Doja Cat, and now her new TDE labelmate Doechii, all thrived, thanks, in part, to SZA’s reimagination of what R&B could sound like.
“I definitely feel like yes,” says SZA when asked if Ctrl influenced artists to create outside the traditional confines of R&B, a genre some claim is dead. “I think we should probably allow things to branch out and not declare things aren’t R&B just because they don't sound like something that's older,” she continues. “I think it's OK for us to go from wherever we were to where we are now and allow that to be just a multifaceted experience. Not anything that truncates a genre or like, causes an erasure of a genre. It's just literally an expansion. It's just allowing for more forms of Black music. And I hate that we cut ourselves off, not even all of us, but that some people cut it off at like, ‘This is R&B.’”
PHOTO CREDIT: Jacob Webster
It’s a few days after the shoot and she’s very thoughtful in conversation. She’s pleasant and open and speaks in a breathy tone that vacillates between assured and just figuring it out. Although she’s threatened to quit music before—when Complex profiled SZA in 2017, she claimed Ctrl might be her last album—right now she’s fully in it, wanting to learn more and, per usual, push herself as far as she can go. She recently worked with choreographer Fullout Cortland on live stage choreography at the Wireless Festival in London, which was a first for her. “I wanted to prove to myself that I can do this and it’s not even like a big deal, I just need to commit to it,” says SZA. “I thought maybe I’m not a choreography artist and I should just focus on vibes or something, but it’s like no. I can be whatever kind of artist I want and I really don’t even have a box, so I should just do it all if I can.”
PHOTO CREDIT: Jacob Webster
Learning is SZA’s driving force. It guides her decision-making and helps her feel full in an industry that constantly drains. She might get anxious about walking a red carpet, but she has no problem saying yes to new challenges, like acting for instance. She’s previously said she would never do it, but she’s trying it out in Tuna Melt, Eddie Huang’s new film that will co-star Euphoria’s Chloe Cherry and Huang, who will play a hitman who falls in love with SZA’s character. “It's definitely still something that's terrifying, but I just really like Eddie Huang,” says SZA. “I loved Fresh Off the Boat. I thought it was fucking hilarious. I loved Baohaus, his restaurant. I loved his book. I just like his brain, so I was just like, ‘OK.’”
When she speaks about music she’s into now, it’s from artists who are defying expectations in the same way she wants to. “That was the biggest risk that I’ve seen anybody take on a mainstream level in the last few years,” says SZA about Beyoncé’s Renaissance album. She also loves her friend Lizzo’s album Special, and Steve Lacey’s Gemini Rights, describing it as “the perfect infusion of relaxed, suburban hood nigga energy and like high musical, high thought content that’s very smart.” And although they are no longer labelmates, she’s always in awe of how Lamar moves. “I'm just grateful to have ever spent any time with him watching and learning and being inspired just from his choices,” says SZA. “Even him being like, ‘I know what people expect of me, so I'm about to do this. Like the conscious choice to do that is really just really powerful”.
There is another great cover story. Consequence featured SZA at a time in the year when she was exhausted and was on the full promotional campaign trail for SOS and her new music. It is a fascinated read. I have selected a few parts of the interview that were of particular interest to me:
“In the time since SZA released a full-length project, she's never fully disappeared; 2021 saw her deliver a series of features alongside artists such as Summer Walker (“No Love”) and Doja Cat (“Kiss Me More”), the latter of which garnered the pair a 2022 Grammy for Best Pop Duo/Group Performance. It was SZA’s first Grammy award, despite receiving 14 nominations over a five-year period. In this time, she also released a number of songs without fanfare as a way to scratch her artistic itch and please fans. Two such singles were “I Hate U” and “Shirt,” the latter of which made it to her new sophomore album, SOS (out on December 9th via Top Dawg Entertainment/RCA).
If CTRL was for the twenty-somethings, SOS is for the thirty-somethings, leaning into both the confidence and the continued uneasiness of the decade with the same unflinching lens that fans have come to expect from SZA.
It’s also the singer’s most daring project, boldly pushing back against the assertion that she’s strictly in the R&B lane. “I'm so tired of being pegged as [an] R&B artist,” SZA says. “I feel like that's super disrespectful, because people are just like, ‘Oh, ‘cause you're Black, this is what you have to be' -- like, put in a box. And I hate that. With songs on this album, it's supposed to help round out the picture and the story.”
Perhaps her ongoing concerns have started to be addressed. After we talk, while the album is categorized as R&B/Soul on Apple Music, it’s promoted in both the R&B and Pop categories on the streaming platform, as well as on Spotify.
“It’s very lazy to just throw me in the box of R&B,” she reiterates. “I love making Black music, period. Something that is just full of energy. Black music doesn’t have to just be R&B. We started rock ‘n’ roll. Why can’t we just be expansive and not reductive?”
Where SOS signals artistic growth, it also finds SZA still fighting to be heard and have control over her life and identity in many ways. She’s not exactly hiding it with the album’s title and artwork, which features the singer suspended over the deep blue sea. Staring out across the water while sitting atop a diving board, her body is small in comparison, almost swallowed by the vastness of the ocean in the photo. In recent interviews, SZA has said she was trying to capture the isolation Princess Diana must’ve felt in a similar photo. As a piece of art, the photograph is a stunning image, but it’s admittedly a bit depressing when you realize it’s a depiction of how she seems to feel in her real life... at least in this moment.
The biggest appeal of SZA has always been her ability to say the quiet parts out loud. It’s her willingness to speak her truth, unflinching and absolutely insistent we bear witness. It’s an impressive feat for a Black woman in general, but as Terrence “Punch” Henderson, SZA's manager and president of Top Dawg Entertainment says, it’s a quality that her music in particular has always possessed”.
Let’s get to a couple of reviews for the sublime and supreme SOS. It is one of the best albums of last year, and it marked a new chapter for one of the most loved and respected artists of her generation. Gaining hugely impassioned reviews across the board, SOS is a masterpiece. This is what The Line of Best Fit observed about SZA’s second studio album:
“In the five years since its release, her debut CTRL has ascended to classic status, going down as one of the decade’s best and cementing SZA’s voice at the forefront of contemporary R&B, and of pop – she joined fellow pop and R&B icon Doja Cat for "Kiss Me More," which became one of 2021’s biggest songs. She dropped "Good Days," the lead single from SOS way back in December 2020 and it joined "Kiss Me More" on the 2021 top songs charts… you see the trend. Anything SZA does hits the heights. That’s why it’s intriguing (and exciting) to see that SOS comprises of a generous 23 tracks. There’s just no way for every track to be single-sized. There must be some surprises buried within the runtime. And of course, SZA delivers.
SOS is a staggeringly confident record, all in SZA’s familiar playground of lush and vibrant R&B. Singles “Good Days,” “I Hate You,” and “Shirt” are all instrumentally rich, vocally excellent masterclasses, but more impressive is the fact that they manage to blend in seamlessly to the rest of SOS, on which there are perhaps more than ten more songs that could have been singles to lead the record. “Kill Bill” is witty and vulnerable with its spiteful, sometime-relatable (if we admit it), ex-revenge plotline and has the woozy sonics to back it up; “Conceited” swings back the other way with sensual swagger and one of the record’s most buoyant vibes. But SZA doesn’t let any of SOS’s myriad highlights compete with each other – they don’t need to.
SZA’s appeal, and indeed the appeal that saw CTRL enter the permanent frequent rotation of most who listened to it, is her emotional aptitude for being vulnerable and playful at the same time, and SOS continues on the same path. There are absolutely five years, probably more, worth of life in the depths of the album. It’s maybe not for one review to pick apart what listeners may find in SOS, because it’s ripe for personal connection to be found within its stories, but it’s definitely to be lauded that SZA chose some of the best in the game to join her in weaving her emotive web. Notably, cropping up on “Ghost in the Machine,” it’s only Phoebe Bridgers – her contribution immediately intoxicating in the moody, moonbeam guitar tones. The song is dark and ethereal enough, but Bridgers, like SZA, has one of the most immediately recognisable voices in music. As the two intertwine, the solar and lunar blend makes for one of SOS’s most gorgeous moments, and it’s followed up by “F2F” which is a fabulously pulled off straight-up rock song. The range.
Did SOS need to be 23 tracks long? Not really. However it doesn’t feel like SZA is trying to make the blueprint for the album arc – she’s making a SZA album, no one else's. It’s something self-indulgent that few could get away with, but every song finds its place effortlessly. So, rather than feeling too self-indulgent, it feels far more like we’re the lucky ones SZA has chosen to share so much with”.
I will finish off with a review from NME. I wonder whether any further singles will be released from SOS. At twenty-three tracks, there is no shortage of options for further singles! If you have missed out on SOS, I would point you in the direction of a work of sheer brilliance from one of the finest artists in the world. It is one of my favourites of 2022:
“Five years ago, SZA was heralded for redefining R&B with her eclectic influences and ‘SOS’ takes that range even further. As well as grunge, pop-punk and acoustic guitars, it slinks through rumbling, dirty bass (‘Low’), soulful, classic ballads (‘Gone Girl’), chipmunk soul (‘Smoking On My Ex Pack’), and much more. In some other artists’ hands, that collage could feel unfocused, but under SZA’s command it feels cohesive, organic and like every skip into a new genre is completely justified for each track.
The New Jersey-born star doesn’t do it all on her own, though. Although not everyone she invited to collaborate on this record came through, those who did show up make an impact. Travis Scott delivers an uncharacteristically – but brilliant – gentle verse on the finger-picked ‘Open Arms’, promising to be “forever riding, forever guiding” to someone who is his “favourite colour”. Texas rapper Don Toliver joins the pity party on ‘Used’, bemoaning a relationship that “feel[s] like it’s over” through glassy autotune, while a raw, urgent sample of Ol’ Dirty Bastard (taken from documentary footage) reinforces SZA’s majestic, powerful aura on the masterful album closer ‘Forgiveless’.
When the tracklist for ‘SOS’ was revealed earlier this week, the most surprising guest could have been Phoebe Bridgers, but the indie darling’s place on the record feels entirely natural given how much SZA has been inspired by the genre in the past. ‘Ghost In The Machine’ is one of the most unusual and experimental cuts on the album, but also one of its best moments, SZA first asking, “Can you make me happy? / Can you keep me happy?” over a woozy, dreamlike tapestry of clatters and ripples. Later, Bridgers lends her elegantly hushed vocals to tell the subject of the song: “You’re not wrong; you’re an asshole.”
“I’m making the best album of my life for this next album,” SZA told Flaunt in 2020 and ‘SOS’ is just that – a phenomenal record that barely puts a foot wrong and raises the bar even higher than she set it before. That quote, though, came with a caveat: “Because it’s going to be my last album.” Here’s hoping SZA reneges on that declaration but, if this is the last we hear from here, at least she’s going out on the highest of highs”.
Maybe a lot of people were not expecting a new album from SZA in 2022. It came in December, and it was such a relief for many fans. It did not disappoint! A stunning album that is hugely impressive and does not tire (in my view), it shows that she had been pretty busy the past few years. SOS is not a call for help or a tired statement. Instead, it is the sound of a remarkable artist with a new lease of life, in the form of her career. The album is…
A huge revelation.