You Should Listen To:
SZA's SOS
Hello! It's been a really long time but I'm back and I'm going to try shaking things up, here's a new column that will basically encapsulate my contemporary music coverage. "You Should Listen To:" Enjoy!
It was like history repeating itself when SZA her second album SOS would be her last. All the way back in 2018, not even one year after Ctrl dropped, she told Flaunt Magazine “My world got so much smaller so fast. I have so much to write about. I feel like I’m in a cage. I’m making the best album of my life for this next album and I know that … because it’s going to be my last album.” And just last month, to reaffirm the suspicions, SZA checks in on Hot 97.1 and says, yes, she is still quitting after SOS.
SZA has considered quitting a bunch of times and whether she’ll quit now, later, or never is the game a SZA fan must play. But this pressure the R&B auteur faces, the “cage” she mentions in interviews and stray tweets, shows a fear of literary burnout. Despite SZA’s jump to stardom and everything else in the world burning, she’s running cold on ideas, like she’s painted herself into a corner. And with 2022’s SOS, I think her fears were right.
Now SOS isn’t bad by any means, it’s actually still very good. The production is cleaner but still more expansive. SZA explores genre fusions of jazz, rock, and even emo on this record, all experiments that hit pretty well. SZA takes up somewhat of a persona on SOS, playing the toxic ex whose timeout in quarantine and catastrophic breakup make every song sound like a manic poetry on the wall written in blood. She is thriving, conniving, and barely surviving on SOS.
Lead single “Kill Bill” references the vengeful hotgirl fury from the 2003 film of the same name, and it sets the tone of the record from the get go. SZA is furious and messy and indecisive, but most importantly, vulnerable. We hear her toy with the idea of killing her ex on here and “Seek & Destroy,” showing a low point for the singer who has been consumed by intrusive thoughts.
But as the record continues, SZA feels more apologetic than retaliatory. “Nobody Gets Me” is the bedroom pop emo anthem that gets straight to the point, with lyrics like “What's left of you / How am I supposed to tell you / I don't wanna see you with anyone but me? / Nobody gets me like you.” The second half of the album shows this general shift from mad girl to sad girl, where SZA travels through 9 levels of hell, 5 stages of grief, and 13 songs to reach some semblance of stability.
Compared to Ctrl, there’s a sense of emotional stasis on SOS that makes it feel stuck in time. SZA is stuck, like we are, in separate rooms for 2 years, and in separate spaceships for probably much longer. But a it is that same feeling of stasis that holds SOS back from the honest feelings of growth that came through on Ctrl. Still though, this album deserves to be listened to, played on repeat for those still stuck inside, or at least once for those who have moved past the social distance we made in ourselves.