Succeeding the recent late-2022 release of her album SOS to all streaming platforms, SZA ends her hiatus and embarks on an artfully emotive climb into the lyrical stratosphere once more, following her break after the release of her 2017 album Ctrl.
Her new album continually sits at the top of the Billboard 200 chart, holding its position for three weeks already as the top new album release. She also sits in the second spot for Billboard’s Artist 100 and is noted as having the hottest R&B song at the moment. Truly a testament to her phenomenally poetic lyricisms and industry-norm subversions.
SOS assumedly sits within the landscape as an R&B/alt R&B album, however, SZA’s influences prove to stem from a variety of genres making the album an eclectic blend of sounds – with songs rooted in pop punk, rap and ballad-like pop music.
Her confessional lyrics and soulful initiative to the genre have made SOS a prolific album of 2022 despite its late release in the year.
SZA tells the Rolling Stones in a podcast interview for Rolling Stone Music Now that she was pejoratively apprehensive to release her album to the public, with fears in the reception of her as an artist – as a non-conformist creator in a rapid-fire strictly-traditional industry.
Her fears can ultimately be debunked in the actuality of the reception of the album. Songs like ‘Kill Bill’ currently sit at around 150 million streams on Spotify, despite only being out since December. Surely this is indication enough that public appraisal was indeed laudatory?
The reverent adoration for her new album has virally sent it to platforms like TikTok, with snippets from her newly released songs as the backing to transitional trends/ and emerging new lyric-related trends, e.g. ‘Good Days’, ‘I Hate U’ and ‘Kill Bill’ have all generated a mass hype on the platform. It is apparent that the emotion behind the lyrics “I might kill my ex, not the best idea, his new girlfriend’s next, how’d I get here” within ‘Kill Bill’ has prompted a trend in which people lip sync to the audio. The viral capabilities of platforms like TikTok have meant the continual relevance of SZA’s album in the charts.
A viral video that surfaced recently was a TikTok vox pop with an elderly woman in the subway somewhere in the US, she is asked to name her favourite new album and she speaks fondly of SOS and specifically the heart-wrenching meaning behind SZA’s song ‘Kill Bill’ – this generated a lot of traction on TikTok sparking positive comments of the community surrounding the new release.
Likewise, raking in around 65k views on TikTok, the artist who animated SZAs album art for alternate cover renditions went viral time lapsing his creative process.
Her inspiration for the album has many roots. Partially fuelled by her involvement with public ridicule but also through motifs of lost love. It is prolific to note that she sits as a woman of colour within a light-skin masculine-dominated genre and thus this album is a metaphorical departure from the “nice girl” archetype that is assumed of her.
Following the release of her album, SZA is set to embark on her first North American arena tour, in February of this year.
The artist has stated that this tour is her way of giving her audience a show that they deserve, whether that means playing a setlist of unreleased songs they’ve heard snippets of on Twitter or deep cuts of released songs. This 2023 tour is SZA’s method of appreciation after the long-anticipated (five years!) wait from her loyal fanbase. Are you as excited as we are to see what she does with the extended album version?
Words By Hannah Doherty
Header Image : @sza Instagram
