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Last year, New Zealand singer Lorde opened her third studio album, Solar Power, by outrightly rejecting the role that many fans have assigned to her on the internet as an omniscient guru/Messiah for millennials and Gen-Zers. “Well, if you’re looking for a savior, that’s not me,” she announced on “The Path.” No shade to the brilliant 26-year-old—the Lorde Hive is borderline cultish—but it’s SZA, a slightly older yet newer female voice in mainstream music, who has always struck me as the more popular candidate for this magisterial position.
Since her massive debut album CTRL in 2017, the 33-year-old singer (whose real name is Solana Rowe) has spent most of her career encouraging young, mainly Black women to be their baddest, freest selves while embracing the messiness that comes with navigating relationships (or “situationships”) and achieving self-love. Her emotionally raw, occasionally funny content on that album exposed a frustrating and relieving conundrum about getting through adulthood. By admitting she didn’t have the answers, she sort of did.
That recipe of confidence, confusion, self-loathing, and self-involvement made SZA’s Grammy-nominated debut not only a certified R&B staple but a sacred text to modern women plagued by the loneliness of social media and the elusiveness of online dating. Much has changed about the world in the five-plus years since she’s released a full body of work, yet her devoted legion of Very Online fans—maybe experiencing a prolonged moment of stasis during a pandemic—have been demanding the same level of transgressiveness on the followup to CTRL. Ahead of the release of her sophomore album, SOS, on Friday, one Twitter user wrote, “I better not see any growth or maturity on this sza album tonight.”
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That kind of demand may sound strange, but while growth and maturity can help an artist like Drake improve their sound, SZA has always worn her most childish instincts and insecurities pretty well—maybe because her lyrics have primarily focused inward as opposed to painting everyone around her as a villain (although there are plenty of fuck-you’s aimed at her exes on SOS). And with only one album to her name, it’s understandable that listeners wouldn’t be ready for a completely transformed version of the artist they were so delightfully introduced to.
Likewise, SZA explores much of the same emotional terrain on SOS as she did on CTRL. Over the course of 23 mostly concise songs, she laments the loss of a cheating ex-boyfriend and hypes herself up before questioning her self-worth and regretting the direction of her now-mainstream career. It’s clear that loneliness and rejection are SZA’s Kryptonite—so much so that the album’s cover is inspired by a sad image of Princess Diana hunched over on a diving board attached to a yacht a week before her death. Unfortunately, the most extreme melancholy can sometimes make for the most compelling art—rarely because it makes us feel better about our own lives, just slightly less alone.
SOS opens with its breathless title track, which samples the ’70s gospel tune “Until I Found the Lord (My Soul Couldn’t Rest)” by The Gabriel Hardeman Delegation. It’s similar to the sort of high-energy, braggadocious opener usually found on a rap album (and you could argue that SZA is a melodic rapper on many of her songs, including this one). “SOS” is also the sort of heightened pep talk a woman might give herself right after being fucked over by a partner, or preceding a revengeful girls’ night out. (Comin’ back/she’s so candid,” she spits. “Comin’ back, snatched like a candid.”) Of course, this level of fuck-you energy only lasts so long until you’re suddenly in the throes of depression. Maybe you repeat this cycle over and over again until you slowly start to heal.
While early songs like “Seek & Destroy” and the predictably violent “Kill Bill” are deliciously spiteful, a more devastating character unfolds throughout the album. On the gorgeous “Special”—a depressing sequel to CTRL’s “Normal Girl,” if you will, SZA regrets giving all of her energy “away to a loser” and the impact his infidelity had on her body image. “Nobody Gets Me” is an unexpected acoustic-driven track about the irreplaceability of a special someone. The equally surprising grunge song “F2F” is another ode to trying (and failing) to fill that emptiness. One of the album’s buzziest offerings, “Ghost In The Machine” featuring indie darling Phoebe Bridgers, finds SZA in a particularly desperate, exhausted state, simply “craving humanity.”
If you’re getting the impression that this album is a total drag, it’s not. Maybe one of SOS’s most impressive features, aside from SZA’s ability to articulate the hardest emotions to say out loud, is her sense of humor while doing so. It’s not even that she constructs fully fleshed punchlines, but rather the casual delivery when she refers to Scarface actress Michelle Pfeiffer as “that white blond bitch with the bob” on the Babyface-produced “Snooze,” or when she brags about her ass on “SOS” before abruptly revealing that it’s “not real.” On “Smokin’ On My Ex Pack,” she suggests that a beloved rapper she once dated’s “dick is wack.” Such brutal honesty and comic relief is needed for an album as lengthy as this. And yet, I’m not sure if it’s enough to justify such a bloated tracklist.
Aside from an obvious editing problem, SOS also suffers from scatteredness; it’s far less conceptual and more mixtape-inspired than the well-organized CTRL. These songs don’t bleed into one another the way they did on her debut, making it a tough album to digest in its entirety without wanting to hop around or to completely rearrange the tracklist. Some of the songs are even wholly unnecessary, like the Travis Scott-assisted “Open Arms,” which fails to recreate the magic of his and SZA’s previous collab “Love Galore” (his signature ad-libs on the trap-influenced “Low” are a more useful contribution). Any of the tracks on the album’s latter half could be replaced with her 2020 Neptunes-produced single featuring Ty Dolla $ign, “Hit Different,” arguably her most well-crafted and innovative song to date.
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While SOS doesn’t feel as experimental as her previous album and EPs—maybe because her signature lo-fi R&B sound has become so popular in the past few years—it’s fun to see the Grammy winner lean into her alternative sad-girl side, as she’s been lauded R&B’s version of that internet archetype. And her pen has undeniably gotten sharper since she was singing about sharing a boyfriend with another woman like swapping shifts with a coworker.
In both old and new interviews, SZA has been startlingly candid about how unsure she is about her career; she’s questioned whether she’s cut out for the pressure of being a beloved musician, and has even expressed regret over some of her biggest hits. In an interview on Hot 97 this week, she admitted that a part of her “didn’t even want [SOS] to come out.” Whether she’ll have it in her to release a third full-length project after this gargantuan batch of songs is anyone’s guess. But SOS will certainly leave fans crossing their fingers for more.
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