Album Review: SZA, ‘SOS’

From the opening strums of “Supermodel,” Ctrl immediately cemented itself as a classic. Almost six years removed from its arrival, SZA’s first solo studio album is widely regarded as one of the best records of the 2010s and a worthy peer to legendary sets such as Ms. Lauryn Hill’s The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. SZA’s pointed lyrics of self-deprecation and reflection lifted her to icon status for the pseudo-generation of younger millennials and older members of Gen Z. It’s the way she delivers the lyrics, however, that further explains her massive reach and success; she snakes in and out of pockets with the flexibility of a rapper and the melodic ingenuity of R&B’s greatest vocal maestros. Easily straddling and purposely muddying the lines between pop, alternative, R&B, and hip-hop — SZA is a chameleon that defies tradition and embraces chaos. With its piercing songwriting and culture-dominating hit singles, Ctrl was the progeny of a very different SZA than the woman who maneuvers through myriad genres on the expansive and perceptive SOS.

With a structure that simultaneously resembles a two-act play and a mixtape, SOS is a remarkable manifesto for the validity of life in the gray area between towering extremes of bogus dichotomies and a love letter to the decidedly non-linear path to wholeness and maturity. In a move that showcases the progression of SZA’s attention to thematic detail, the album opens with the Morse code distress call of “SOS.” SZA is in danger; compounding terrors of garbage exes, crippling self-doubt and anxiety, and the trappings of romanticized memories threaten to drown our girl. The distress signal soon gives way to the album’s title song and thesis — a scrappy rap track that finds SZA eviscerating her detractors and demanding space and respect for herself over a weepy sample of Gabriel Hardeman Delegation’s “Until I Found the Lord (My Soul Couldn’t Rest).” With “SOS,” SZA starts her sophomore album with a direct nod to her storied fusion of the sacred and the secular. In this way, SOS announces itself as a blues album for the 2020s.

On the album’s titular song, SZA casually confirms getting a BBL and flexes her songwriting prowess over soulful production courtesy of Jay Versace. SZA, with her focused explorations on the emotional odysseys of young Black women in the 21st century, has always operated in the spirit of the Black women blues singers before her. There are two moments on “SOS,” in particular — her interpolation of Beyoncé’s “Listen” and her lyrical reference to Grammy-nominated jazz and gospel icon Della Reese — that solidify the track as a clue into SZA’s take on the blues. SZA’s use of “and I cried and cried, and said what’s on my mind” draws a lyrical throughline from 1957 to 2007 to 2020, and evokes the feeling of freedom and expansion that marked a fellow Black woman’s sophomore era (Beyoncé’s B’Day). As for the Della Reese mention, it’s yet another example of SZA explicitly defining who exactly she is speaking to. Pop smashes like “Kiss Me More” and an ironclad grip on TikTok’s tastebuds may have ballooned SZA’s popularity since Ctrl, but she’s still focusing on relaying her experiences as a Black woman to her Black women listeners, first and foremost.

The album’s artwork revels in the blues. Inspired by a photograph of Princess Diana taken shortly before her untimely passing, the album’s cover finds SZA perched at the edge of diving board, gazing out towards a rich blue sea. If the heaps of negative space weren’t clear enough, the SZA that greets us on SOS is in a very lonely place. Her fear of falling back into an abyss of lonesomeness is the motivation for the sultry stalker anthem “Kill Bill,” which doubles as the album’s breakout single. “I just killed my ex / Not the best idea / Killed his girlfriend next / How’d I get here,” SZA muses over steady drum kicks. Across genres, there’s a rich history of women singing about killing men who have wronged them. To understand “Kill Bill,” you must first look at murderous anthems like Victoria Spivey’s “Murder in the First Degree” (1928), Both songs share the DNA of a scorned lover enacting fatal revenge, but their respective narrative progressions are both reliant on repetition, and that’s the blues undercurrent that races throughout SOS. By the end of “Kill Bill,” SZA concludes that she’d “rather be in hell than alone,” a simultaneous nod to the prevalence of religious imagery in her songwriting and a tease of living in a personal hell of your own creation.

The loneliness that SZA so desperately wants to escape on SOS is a byproduct of borderline catastrophic relationships. “Love Language,” which interpolates Aaliyah’s “I Don’t Wanna” and samples SZA’s own “Hit Different,” finds SZA pleading for transparency from her lover. To make a long story short, the blame for the implosion of her relationships does not rest solely on SZA’s shoulders. She’s doing the work and searching for ways to connect with her lover despite being met with a pile of nothing from his end. Nonetheless, on “Blind,” a stunning guitar-backed ballad that sounds exactly like a grown-up Ctrl song, SZA comes to the devastating realization that she is sometimes her own worst enemy. “It’s so embarrassing / All of the love I seek living inside of me / I can’t see it,” she laments. She’s aware that she’s been looking for love in the wrong places, so her primary challenge is to now conquer the alluring comfort that comes with emotional blindness. What you don’t know and can’t see won’t hurt you, right? Through these careful evaluations of her relationships with her partner and herself, SZA is able to expand on the destructive tendencies of toxic love with “Seek & Destroy” and wax poetic about the bleak fatigue of being taken advantage of with the Don Toliver-assisted “Used.” Admittedly, SZA spends a lot of time hammering similar themes and emotions on SOS, so moments like “Snooze,” perhaps the most traditional R&B record on the album, are welcome ruminations on why she’s putting so much stock into this volatile relationship, to begin with. By the end of the album’s first half, “Notice Me,” with its bouncy Doja Cat-esque production and pithy lyrics, and “Gone Girl,” with its grandiose cinematic allusions, choir, and modulations, showcase a version of SZA who is finally starting to put herself first. SZA closes Side A of the album as a person who is “tryna grow without hating the process,” and in her own words, we’ll “never replace her.”

If “SOS” functioned as the opening track for Side A of the album, then the delightfully spunky “Smoking on My Ex Pack” serves the same purpose for Side B. Here, SZA once again flexes her rap skills, coolly rhyming over a chopped-up sample of Webster Lewis’ “Open Up Your Eyes.” While the first act of SOS primarily focused on parsing through the rubble of SZA’s relationship, the album’s second act finds her opening up her eyes to her own missteps and the other sources of pressure in her life. She embraces elements of villainy with lines like, “Them ‘ho’ accusations weak / Them ‘bitch’ accusations true,” but by the end of the song, the ex pack has been smoked and SZA needs to look inwards. “Ghost in Machine,” in which SZA meanders through a cyberpunk wasteland alongside Phoebe Bridgers, is an insightful look at how the demands of the music industry destroy any trace of joy, thus nurturing further anxiety for our protagonist. SZA and Phoebe’s voices pair incredibly well, their hauntingly intense tones float across the track with the airiness and gloom of a ghoul sauntering through the night. The two singers search for humanity and love to counterbalance the sinister nature of the industry at any cost, even if that means rummaging around in a pile of faulty partners. The pop-punk-indebted “F2F,” which features songwriting contributions and background vocals from Lizzo, finds SZA yet again swerving into a new genre. She manipulates her tone to emulate that singular bratty blink-182-esque nasality as she explains that she only has sex with other people to forget the memory of the partner she wants the most. The song’s realism offers a nice contrast to the haze of metaphor under which “Ghost in the Machine” exists, but it also sets up a thematic link to the subsequent song.

Alongside ‘Kill Bill,” “Nobody Gets Me” has been positioned as an official radio single to promote SOS. It’s an expected and obvious choice, but some things are really just that cut and dry. From the sweeping melody to the way the hook expands the romance-focused nature of the song’s verses, “Nobody Gets Me” was engineered to become SZA’s defining ballad. It’s a natural offshoot from the breezy guitar-anchored “Drew Barrymore,” starkly honest lyrics (“You were balls-deep, now we beefin' / Had me butt-naked at the MGM”) and all. When she sings, “Hurry now, baby, stick it in / 'Fore the memories get to kickin' in,” SZA recalls the frantic need to escape her own memories on “F2F,” but she’s slowly getting to a place where she can internalize how cataclysmic this relationship is, despite how much she may still want it. With an exhausting runtime of 67 minutes, SOS is a lengthy affair. It’s easy to miss all the gems littered throughout this 23-track opus, but keep an eye out for “Conceited.” A more laidback answer to Flo Milli’s self-love anthem of the same name, “Conceited” finds SZA finally achieving a sense of contentment with where she’s at in her life. She’s no longer seeking validation from anyone but herself. The hook is simple — she really just stretches out the phrase “I’m bettin’ on me” to fill up the time — but incredibly effective. The repetition of the word “me” places SZA as the subject of a self-love journey that’s finally hitting real progress points. Although she’ll consider some major decisions regarding her ex-partner (“Too Late”), she can no longer waste her tears or time on him. “Conceited” is the most obvious and unsuspecting answer to the false narrative that SOS shows no lyrical or conceptual growth from Ctrl.

Side B of SOS houses several of the album's pre-release singles including “I Hate U,” “Shirt,” and the Grammy-nominated “Good Days.” Each track fits comfortably in the narrative and sonic context of the full album, but they do sound a bit stale since we’ve been listening to them (in some capacity) for almost two years now. Furthermore, songs like “Special” end up feeling less revelatory and more redundant, despite SZA’s stunningly desolate vocal performance, because they emphasize beats that she’s already hit on stronger songs earlier on the album. “Open Arms,” a collaboration with Travis Scott, reignites the flame beneath SZA’s mélange of the sacred and the secular with a gospel-indebted melody and lyrics that champion unconditional love in the face of more obsidian tracks like “Shirt.” With its closer, a sonic collage called “Forgiveless” which features contributions from the late Ol’ Dirty Bastard, SOS returns to the thumping hip-hop cadence of its opener. SZA rejoices in “not being in the dark anymore” and, at last, getting to a space where she can explore the boundlessness of true self-confidence. “I don't need nobody help, angels surround me, though,” she proclaims. SZA may not have answered all the questions she posed on Ctrl, and on much of SOS, but some answers are better than none at all.

A slightly bloated yet remarkably personable album, SOS has done the unthinkable and actually lived up to the hype. SZA’s sophomore album rejects the restrictive nature of traditional genre lines and prioritizes the ugliest parts of soul-searching all while housing some of her slickest singles to date. Already a blockbuster, SOS felt like one upon release. Nonetheless, the album still finds much of its charm in its roughness. The mixing and pacing of the album are more similar to that of a mixtape, but its narrative composition and thematic sequencing feel like a polished stage play. SOS isn’t without its flaws, but it’s an album from an artist who almost exclusively operates in the hypnotic gray of humanity’s flaws, so, of course, it all comes together.

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Score: 86