On the long-awaited follow up to 2017’s CTRL, SZA continues to explore herself as a multifaceted character, embodying what it means to be a woman today.
CTRL remains a cultural touchstone for an entire generation. One of the best debut albums in recent memory, CTRL captured the nostalgic whirlwind of youth and femininity through the eyes of gendered roles: the lover, the other woman, the career-driven, the daughter, the granddaughter, and so much more, interspersed with messages from her mother and grandmother. Back then, she sang to “20 something’s” with “not a thing in [their] name”. Five years later, a global pandemic, and a geopolitical and economic crisis later, how much has changed?
On SOS, SZA wants us to own and embrace these insecurities. Perhaps the message of “love yourself” and self-positivity is a relic of a time of lockdowns and loneliness, but SZA’s lyricism marries the banal and the profound to give an insight to the complexities of womanhood. On ‘Blind’, SZA boasts, “my pussy precedes me”, a mere joke on the surface yet a criticism of her objectification, while on ‘Notice Me’, she presents herself as the vulnerable sad girl – “I don’t want to be your girlfriend / I’m just trying to be your person.”
On the gospel-sampling titular track, SZA outlines the themes of the album, with the bad bitch attitude of “No more fuck shit, I’m done / Damn right, I’m the one”, before ending with an interpolation of Beyoncé’s ‘Listen’ – “And I cried and cried / Said what’s on my mind.” The duality of confidence and insecurity is a constant of the 23-track album, reflected in Phoebe Bridgers’ appearance midway through the album on ‘Ghost in the Machine’, singing, “I don’t get existential / I just think about myself and look where that got me”, marking a tonal shift in the album – the hip-hop beats of the record’s first half make way for spaced-out guitars for much of the second half. While SZA uses the first half of the album to play with more mainstream trap sounds and flex her rapping skills, SZA explores her more alternative influences, from Avril Lavigne on ‘F2F’ to Mazzy Star on ‘Nobody Gets Me’.
What makes SOS so compelling is SZA’s confessional lyricism, in the vein of other great female songwriters, taking cues from Lauryn Hill, Taylor Swift, and Stevie Nicks, among others. How many other singers can throw out lines like “I might kill my ex, not the best idea” on ‘Kill Bill’ or “I fuck him cause I miss you” on F2F, and relate its emotional complexities to the listener?
SOS comes almost two years after its lead single, “Good Days”, was released on Christmas 2020. Already a classic in SZA’s growing catalogue, “Good Days” was an optimistic look to the future, leaving the memory of 2020 in the past. SOS is a collection of these moments in time, snippets of emotion that jump from place to place, both thematically and sonically, and rarely lasting over three minutes. Though the album doesn’t have the cohesion and compactness that gave CTRL its iconic status, it’s a fascinating collage that fills in her last five years of growth – at 33, she’s now embraced every aspect of herself.
Words by Stephen Ong
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