SZA: SOS Album Review - Pitchfork

SZA has mastered the creation of the interior monologue, transforming profoundly idiosyncratic observations into gilded songs that consciousness intimate, relatable, and untouchable, each astatine once. On her singular debut album, CTRL, she narrated these contradictions done warbled melodies that threw modern R&B and popular opus operation retired the window, letting her dependable weave in, over, and done the beats, successful a benignant that recalled the jazzy operation of Joni Mitchell and the method prowess of Minnie Riperton. 

Not having a accepted formula, it turned out, was a winning tack: CTRL was certified triple platinum this August, reflecting some its continued relevance and fans’ salivatory desperation for a follow-up 5 years later. Of course, she’s been engaged successful the clip since, having dropped 16 singles oregon collabs—including the Oscar-nominated Black Panther track “All the Stars,” with Kendrick Lamar—an album’s worthy of worldly unto itself, positive a tiny fistful of wildly acidic videos similar “Good Days” and “Shirt.” She had the summertime of 2021 successful a chokehold with the record-breaking cellophane candy that is “Kiss Me More,” with Doja Cat. She’s filming a movie. She dropped immoderate Crocs. She taught herself to play philharmonic bowls. Like, damn. 

The screen of SOS depicts SZA, a erstwhile marine biology major, perched connected a diving committee surrounded by the heavy bluish ocean, her look pointed contemplatively astatine the sky. She was inspired by a 1997 photograph of Princess Diana connected Mohamed Al Fayed’s yacht taken 1 week earlier her decease and said she wanted to wage homage to the “isolation” it conveyed. On SOS, she feels similar a superwoman who deserves the satellite 1 minute, and a depressive second-stringer sacrificing her well-being for garbage men the next. She counteracts the millennial Bad Bitch/Sad Girl dichotomy (tale arsenic aged arsenic time) by filling successful the immense affectional abstraction between. The medium opens with the Morse codification distress telephone and a illustration of the Gabriel Hardeman Delegation’s 1976 gospel exhortation “Until I Found the Lord (My Soul Couldn’t Rest),” which pb her into a muscular opus of self-determination, singing successful a rap cadence/breath-control flex astir however she’s simply implicit the “fuckshit.” This opening rubric way sets up a benignant of thesis for astir of the album: that adjacent amid self-doubt, she’s gloved up, successful the ring, a heavyweight champ looking for the belt.

We already cognize SZA’s dedication to her enactment is indefatigable—amid nationalist statement woes with her longtime grounds statement TDE and her major-label spouse RCA, she wrote hundreds of songs for what became SOS, truthful culling it to conscionable 23 is, successful context, an workout successful restraint. At the aforesaid time, SOS is a wide papers of however extensively SZA has sharpened her songwriting since the exquisite CTRL, however she’s go an adjacent much exacting lyricist and imaginative musician. While placing herself firmly successful the contented of R&B, she’s forcefully blasé astir genre tropes. On SOS, she belts her look disconnected connected an instant classical “fuck you” fig (“I Hate U”) alongside a savage rap way that recalls the glory days of carnal mixtapes (“Smokin connected my Ex Pack”) and, possibly improbably, a state opus with a pop-punk chorus astir revenge enactment (“F2F”). This tin sometimes onshore successful the mushy middle—“Ghost successful the Machine,” her breathlessly anticipated collab with Phoebe Bridgers, finds them mirroring each others’ vocal timbres implicit glitch electronica implicit with synthetic harps courtesy of predominant collaborators Rob Bisel and Carter Lang. And “Special,” a way astir assemblage dysmorphia, sounds similar she was penning from a Swiftian persona, à la her loosie “Joni,” yet comes disconnected a spot pat sandwiched betwixt a compendium of songs wherever she richly depicts the aforesaid sentiment.