album review: 's.o.s.' by sza

…you know, I can imagine it feels obvious to start the conversation with ‘where the hell has this been’, because that’s been the discourse around new music from SZA for at least the past two years… but I’d also argue that it’s more complicated than it might seem on the surface, as the more I’ve thought about it, the more I think there’s no easy answer or single culprit.

Granted, some of this conversation goes back to Ctrl, which even coming from a label with TDE’s pedigree and a sizable groundswell of support, especially in R&B, seemed to catch a lot of folks offguard especially with how much longevity it had. That album’s critical acclaim and excellent sales run combined with a plethora of crossover features in 2017-18 turned SZA into a household name, and while I still have some contentious, lingering opinions about Ctrl and its position in R&B - I don’t think it’s the origin point of its influence and sound, I’d chalk that up to Jhene Aiko and other, blissed-out, alternative R&B acts that are SZA’s contemporaries - I’m also not about to deny the album’s impact, and I wanted to hear the follow-up.

Flash forward to the beginning of 2021 - I knew any album from SZA was going to take time and 2020 derailed pretty much everyone’s plans, so when ‘Good Days’ dropped as a gorgeous expansion of her sound, I was thrilled for whatever could be coming… and now it’s nearly two years later. And it’s tough to pin down why it’s been delayed this much - SZA has had widely publicized issues with TDE and Punch, but I also know that a significant portion of those interviews are a rollout in disguise and reinforce her image. I also place a portion of this on SZA herself - as an artist she seems to have more focus on a free range, less controlled method of releasing music and that can give every promo team headaches - but let’s be real, who probably bears the most blame is RCA, the major label cosign who has a notorious reputation for fumbling the acts who are not priorities on their roster… or even the ones who are and have tangible traction that they do not seem organized enough to handle properly. Yeah, an artist might get a single working, but a timely followthrough rarely materializes, especially around R&B and hip-hop, with the most glaring examples being BROCKHAMPTON and Normani who deserved better runs than they got. It got so bad that until this album actually landed on DSPs, I wouldn’t believe it because RCA screws up that often. And in my opinion with SZA it was inexcusable; you had someone with tangible, well-connected starpower, critical acclaim, a diehard fanbase that will buy albums, and even multiple charting singles - how do you fuck that up?

But alright, the album is actually here… a 68 minute, 23 song project where even tacking on the successful singles had me worried this wound up this long to oversaturate fans - or at worst, a cynical play for stream trolling. Granted, if we’re looking at TDE projects a lot of them run longer than they should, and maybe it would feel like it justifies the runtime, especially five years after Ctrl, so what did we get on SOS?

…oh, this review is not going to make anyone happy, I just know it. Because once again, we have another entry in me just not being as impressed with a new, critically acclaimed SZA album as everyone else, even if I’d absolutely agree that there’s enough varied and gorgeous moments to justify much of its sprawl. But interspersed between those moments is a lot of underwhelming filler or songs that seem very ‘agenda-driven’, the cuts that over the course of a long development time the labels insisted SZA include to serve many demographics. More alarmingly, I wasn’t able to shake the feeling of this album being long-stranded in development hell with a mercurial but self-possessed artist at odds with labels that don’t quite grasp what made Ctrl work and are trying to recreate that success while simultaneously jump on a half dozen other different directions. And while I have defended even more sprawling and languid R&B projects - Jhene Aiko’s put out at least two similar and they’re among the best of their respective years - SOS isn’t clicking as strongly as a whole, even if moments are truly forward thinking or brilliant.

And I think we have to start this conversation with structure, because there are passing attempts at a self-contained theme - the heartbreak and grief that SZA is trying to untangle through the ups and downs of her mostly faded relationships, a plea for help that half the time she doesn’t even seem to want even if she might desperately need it. And it’s messy, spanning grief and capricious anger and fear and isolation and reconnections that don’t even make much sense at the time but feel emotionally true, along with some therapeutic attempts to plumb deeper into the roots of all of this even if there’s not much success; there’s passing concern about looking good juxtaposed with how a lot of this is not a good look. And when SZA can sprawl into that messy adult melodrama, especially when she knows it’s not working for very adult reasons, allow the textured expanses of the music to wind through her multitudes and process, the album becomes a potent listen… but that only works as an excuse for questionable structure, worse pacing, and truly wonky sequencing for so long, especially when many of these cuts feel abbreviated, more written to capture a snippet that’ll go viral rather than delve deeper, or at worst a little redundant. SZA apparently wrote hundreds of songs to cull down to 23 for this album, and I believe that if only because you can tell this was assembled piecemeal rather than with a sharper focus for thematic cohesion, or any consistent focus on lyrical detail; that’s probably a label call as well as including the older singles, because they care more about individual cuts working and the rest functioning as a pick-and-mix streaming playlist where fans will preemptively justify any weird sequencing and just pick their favourites for their own playlists.

But as a critic who likes albums that feel self-contained or at the very least have stronger underlying themes or care about sequencing - forget the comparisons I could make to fka twigs’ Caprisongs this year or any Jhene Aiko album, it was one of the biggest strengths on Ctrl, an album that could also meander - SOS is frustrating. Despite being predominantly midtempo, the pacing is wonky, a lot of songs feel abbreviated, and while I like the stylistic expansions and overall improvement on production quality, there are swerves that I feel could be better executed. The midsection of this album is a prime example, mostly because it features some of SZA’s best songs but sequenced in a way that doesn’t flatter them: ‘Gone Girl’ is cinematic with the swells of backing vocals, the emotive drama of being torn in a relationship that ‘works’ only on the surface especially with the implied context of the movie, the key change, it’s a fantastic song… and then you follow it with a chipmunk-backed 90 second kissoff moment that has some cute lines and shows SZA can rap better than you’d expect, but it’s a tonal swerve. And that follows into the ethereal Phoebe Bridgers collab ‘Ghost In The Machine’ which serves as a contemptuous vent session against the music industry who dumps on the overexposure and commodifies the humanity at the core of their art, a humanity that in referencing the yogi Sadhguru is on a different continuum to morality, which can feel at cross-purposes; very Nietzsche as well, and it does a lot to highlight why a moralistic framing doesn’t work with SZA’s material, both past and present. So naturally the follow-up is the 90s/2000s pop rock of ‘F2F’, which many have called a highlight and SZA’s a good enough performer to sell it, especially the disaffected fucking to get over a breakup, but the guitars are crushed and it’s just not as tuneful as the cymbals and distorted whistle have more presence. More importantly, despite revealing some interesting philosophical underpinnings behind the emotional drama - and the fact that irregardless of framing morality SZA doesn’t seem happy - the album tears away from that introspection almost immediately! Realistically human, absolutely, but also frustrating as all hell, and it doesn’t help this album build to a climax or flow!

And what’s more exasperating beyond the fact that the liquid guitars and keys and more organic percussion tends to lend itself to a good flow is that there are so many moments that I find utterly gorgeous or fascinating, and that competent sequencing could have them build to more! The first song I really love on this album is ‘Low’, a Travis Scott-assisted vindictive trap song with some great organ that serves as a nice contrast to the dejected love of their collab later ‘Open Arms’ where none of this relationship was healthy and she knows it but on some level it worked… but the emotional drama of this is rooted in the messy, lingering breakup of ‘Nobody Gets Me’ right after ‘F2F’ that sounds imported from the mid-2000s with the vocal mixing and more watery texture. These three songs have ten and six songs between them respectively, so picking up the emotional threads becomes really tenuous. Or take ‘Snooze’ with Don Toliver, who serves as a really nice counterbalance to her nihilism that underscores a lot of this album - but you’re only going to get the roots of that four songs later on ‘Ghost In The Machine’ with multiple, tangible mood shifts in between! Or take the husky acoustic bedroom pop of ‘Special’ where she wanted to be special for someone who then cheated on her and triggered a lot of insecurities and it seems like she finds a point of clarity… so naturally it’s preceded by a brittle trap throwaway in ‘Conceited’ that might be the worst song on the album if the chipmunked hook of ‘Blind’ didn’t annoy me endlessly, and followed by the cycling guitars and pleading for an attempt to try again on ‘Too Late’ that feels like an attempt to recapture the vibes of ‘Good Days’ without the melodic intricacy, and then another creaking, offkey trap tune in ‘Far’ where she’s done with all of this again, that we already heard multiple times at the beginning of this album. And speaking of ‘Good Days’, it pretty much had to be here as one of the best songs she’s ever made and it could work as a solid thematic conclusion, finding that bliss and peace… and then we get ‘Forgiveless’ as the closer, with a few tangible Ole Dirty Bastard samples and SZA asserting that while she’s forgiven, she won’t forget and she’s still a bad bitch and she remains ruthless and even though it feels authentic to the album, it feels like such a downer ending, and evidence of the jarring tonal clashes all over this thing!

Look, there’s a thematic core to this album that I really like: SZA has been through what sounds like a hellish few years especially in relationships, she’s openly questioned what all of it means through tensions with her labels, she’s angry and heartbroken and trying to find clarity on where the hell she goes from here having lost so much, especially as a lot of the nihilistic posturing hasn’t really made her happy either; there’s no easy answer, and embracing that meditative complexity or even some loss of control has some resonance, isolated and adrift and trying to find a home where you’re not really sure where it is, but you’ve found some security in yourself. But maybe it’s the lack of greater lyrical detail, the whiplash tonal shifts, the feel of any flow of climax constantly getting undercut, or how a lot of truly great songs could have been brought into a tighter R&B classic if they weren’t surrounded by inconsistently produced diversions with underpowered hooks designed for cheap virality… it holds this album back from being way better than it is! And again, I understand the preemptive justification of “realism” or “relatability” being made to explain the structural issues - I just don’t buy it as much because I’d put money on RCA telling SZA to shelve a lot of more complicated or personal songs to be ‘relatable’ to the audience that wants digestible pop trap and never understood why Ctrl had such lasting emotional resonance, because that would require RCA to do work that they seem categorically unwilling to do in chasing a lower common denominator. So amidst transcendent, thought-provoking moments you get a lot of disposable filler that might work in the short term on Tiktok but won’t stick, and it leaves SOS a very good but not great album as a whole. It’s one of the reasons I’m not surprised to hear some rumours that this is her last project - after the mess she went through to get this out, I wouldn’t blame SZA - but man, would that be a shame because there are glimpses of it here that I really wish came together better. It is still worth hearing and checking out, I get why it’s getting so much acclaim, but SZA is a more interesting artist than what they often have her doing, and that’s worth talking about.