Movies

SZA: Review of the SOS album | Fork

December 9, 2022

SZA has mastered the art of inner monologue, turning deeply personal observations into golden songs that feel at once intimate, relatable and untouchable. On his remarkable debut album, CTRLshe told these contradictions through twittering melodies that threw the modern structure of R&B and pop song out the window, letting her voice weave in, over and through the beats, in a style that recalled the jazzy structure of Joni Mitchell and Minnie’s technical prowess. Riperton.

It turned out that not having a traditional formula was a winning strategy: CTRL was certified triple platinum in August, reflecting both its continued relevance and fans’ salivating desperation for a follow-up five years later. Of course, she’s been busy ever since, having released 16 singles or collabs, including the Oscar-nominated Black Panther track “All the Stars”, featuring Kendrick Lamar – an album’s worth in itself, plus a small handful of extremely sour videos like “Good Days” and “Shirt”. She had the summer of 2021 in a chokehold with the record-breaking cellophane candy that is “Kiss Me More,” featuring Doja Cat. She is making a movie. She dropped Crocs. She taught herself to play musical bowls. Like damn.

The cover of S.O.S. depicts SZA, a former marine biology student, perched on a diving board surrounded by the deep blue ocean, her contemplative face skyward. She was inspired by a 1997 photograph of Princess Diana on Mohamed Al Fayed’s yacht taken a week before her death and said she wanted to pay tribute to the “isolation” she conveyed. On S.O.S., she feels like a superwoman deserving the world one minute, and a depressed second string sacrificing her well-being for garbage collectors the next. She counters the millennial Bad Bitch/Sad Girl (tale as old as time) dichotomy by filling in the vast emotional space between the two. The album opens with the Morse Code distress call and a sample of the Gabriel Hardeman Delegation’s 1976 gospel exhortation “Until I Found the Lord (My Soul Couldn’t Rest) “, which lead her into a muscular opus of self-determination, singing in a rap cadence / breath control flex about how she is simply above “shit”. This opening title track sets up a sort of thesis for most of the album: that even in the midst of doubt, she’s gloved, in the ring, a heavyweight champion in search of the belt.

We already know that SZA’s dedication to her work is tireless – amid public label woes with her longtime label TDE and major partner RCA, she wrote hundreds of songs for what became S.O.S., so cutting him down to just 23 is, in context, an exercise in restraint. At a time, S.O.S. is a clear document of how SZA has refined his writing from the exquisite CTRL, how she became an even more demanding lyricist and imaginative musician. While placing herself firmly in the tradition of R&B, she is forcefully jaded by genre tropes. On S.O.S., she goes face-to-face on an instant classic “fuck you” number (“I Hate U”) alongside a wild rap track reminiscent of the glory days of physical mixtapes (“Smokin on my Ex Pack”) and, perhaps unlikely, a country song with a pop-punk chorus about sexual revenge (“F2F”). It can land in the middle of soft dough at times – “Ghost in the Machine”, his long-awaited collab with Phoebe Bridgers, finds them mirroring each other’s vocal timbres over glitchy electronics with synthetic harps courtesy of collaborators frequent Rob Bisel and Carter Lang. And “Special,” a track about body dysmorphia, sounds like she’s writing from a Swiftian character, akin to her “Joni” loosie, but comes off a bit sandwiched between a songbook where she portrays richly the same feeling.