SZA’s performance on Saturday Night Live on December 3 featured a few surprises. SZA played her most recent single “Shirt” as her opening number during the Keke Palmer-hosted programme before disclosing the release date of her sophomore album, S.O.S. “Shirt” premiered at No. 11 on the Billboard Hot 100 in early November.
SZA deftly slipped in some images announcing the release date of her eagerly awaited second album, S.O.S., on December 9 toward the end of the sombre song, which she sang while performing in front of a starry backdrop and flanked by two dancers.
Days beforehand, SZA debuted the album’s strange cover image, which shows the artist wearing a sports jersey and perched on the edge of a diving board that is suspended over a sizable body of water. Ctrl, her debut album from 2017, was followed by S.O.S, which debuted at No. 3 on the Billboard 200.
SZA debuted the new song “Blind” during her second SNL performance, providing another sneak peek of her next album. This time, the singer chose a full backing band with strings and sang the lovely piece carefully while surrounded by splashing waves and a foggy lighthouse.
After making her SNL debut in 2017 to showcase her album Ctrl, SZA made her second appearance this year. Most recently, SZA was the cover star of Billboard’s R&B/Hip-Hop Power Players issue. She expressed doubts about the longevity of her career in music and the direction it will take in the cover article.
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What Is SOS About?
SZA realising she is afraid of herself and sends out a distress signal to anyone who will listen, in my interpretation of SOS. Her feeling of control is lost, and she experiences an emotional roller coaster, if the album and Ctrl are working together.
On the one hand, she is afraid of what she may do, such as kill her ex and his new girlfriend (not literally, but she considers it), or just cry about not knowing what to do without her ex’s presence in her life on “F2F.” SZA sings, “Nobody gets me like you/ How am I meant to let you go? I only feel like myself when we’re together.
She is trying to persuade herself that she doesn’t require her ex when the pendulum swings the other way to her confident side. In the end, SZA is striving to push past the negative, leaving the things that don’t serve her.
“Conceited” displays her braggadocious swagger as she declares, “I got no need to depend on you.” But for the time being, she is in limbo and feels as though she is in the midst of the ocean.
ARC: The album’s songs frequently sound like musical iterations of the “This is Fine” meme, demonstrating SZA’s apparent joy in peril. She sings about rushing into relationships that develop into toxic co-dependency and on how love may change into hatred and back again in her songs. She sings on the song “Shirt,” “In the dark right now/Feeling lost, but I like it.”
Most of the tracks on this album are written in the second person, with a hyper-specific target, yet it’s unclear to whom specifically she is sending a distress signal. She makes the point repeatedly that being in a relationship, no matter how painful, is preferable to being alone. She directly asks: “Can you make me happy? ” on “Ghost in the Machine. Could you please me?”
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SZA’s ‘SOS’ Track list
- ‘SOS’
- ‘Kill Bill’
- ‘Seek and Destroy’
- ‘Low’
- ‘Love Language’
- ‘Blind’
- ‘Used’ (feat. Don Toliver)
- ‘Snooze’
- ‘Notice Me’
- ‘Gone Girl’
- ‘Smoking on My Ex Pack’
- ‘Ghost in the Machine’ (feat. Phoebe Bridgers)
- ‘F2F’
- ‘Nobody Gets Me’
- ‘Conceited’
- ‘Special’
- ‘Too Late’
- ‘Far’
- ‘Shirt’
- ‘Open Arms’ (feat. Travis Scott)
- ‘I Hate U’
- ‘Good Days’
- ‘Forgiveness’ (feat. Ol’ Dirty Bastard)
How Is SOS Different From Ctrl?
Let’s get this out of the way right away: Anyone expecting Ctrl Part 2 will be dissatisfied. The goal statement for Ctrl was tightly wrapped, coherent in both theme and sound. Moisés Mendez II: On Ctrl, SZA had a defined path and hardly ever deviated from it. It was precisely this precision that helped the album touch so strongly with many listeners.
Together with Travis Scott, she produced some incredible R&B songs as well as the rare trap hit. She lacked the confidence she exudes on SOS on Ctrl, though. In a Genius interview, she clarified what Ctrl meant. I have no power. Control is not something that exists. In search of control. I long for authority. My control is slipping.
This is apparent throughout the album, such as on the songs “Normal Girl,” where she struggles with being regarded as being beyond the norm, and “Go Gina,” where she claims that picking up a penny with press-on nails, which is a notoriously difficult thing to do, is easier than being with a man.
Long breaks from music are rarely profitable, but SZA was able to expand on all the best elements of Ctrl on her most recent album. ARC: SOS is a more comprehensive album than Ctrl in a number of ways. It first takes up 70 minutes and includes 23 songs. SOS draws from trap, pop-punk, boom-bap, indie power ballads, and chipmunked soul sounds.
It’s usual for musicians to broaden their musical horizons on sophomore albums, whereas Ctrl mainly relied on muted electric guitars and dreamy synthesisers. A common result of this ambition is that musicians give in to large label demands and lose sight of what initially made them great.
Pharrell, Benny Blanco, and Jeff Bhasker, names that bring prestige but run the risk of obscuring SZA’s vision, are all listed in the SOS production credits. SOS, however, demonstrates the range of SZA’s great talent even though it is undoubtedly less concentrated than Ctrl.
Most of it also functions. The album resembles SZA’s Donda in terms of weight and variety, at the risk of invoking Kanye, if that makes any sense.
SZA- ‘SOS’ Review
SZA’s debut album, “CTRL,” was released five years ago, and in what seemed like the blink of an eye, she rose to sudden fame. With the release of that song, the borders of R&B began to blur. A new level of creativity was added to a traditional sound, and it was combined with other genres such as indie, alternative, trap music, and more.
Since that album’s release in 2017, both critics and fans have been clamouring for new music from the artist, but despite a few soundtrack appearances and collaborations, new songs have been hard to come by. It makes sense because SZA herself spent the time following the release of “CTRL” attempting to grasp her newfound fame and the profound effects it had on her life.
How could she maintain her status as the R&B equivalent of the girl next door if the world was so interested in her personal life and the album that established her in that position? The cover of SOS features SZA, a former marine biology major, sitting on a diving board in the middle of a deep blue ocean with her head cocked in thought.
She cited a 1997 portrait of Princess Diana shot on Mohamed Al Fayed’s yacht one week before her passing as her inspiration and claimed she wanted to honour the “isolation” it suggested. On SOS, she alternates between feeling like a superwoman deserving of the entire world one moment and a depressed backup player risking her wellbeing for jerks the next.
By bridging the wide emotional gap between them, she breaks down the generational Bad Bitch/Sad Girl dichotomy (story as old as time). This opening title track sets up a kind of thesis for most of the album: that even amid self-doubt, she’s gloved up, in the ring, a heavyweight champ loo.
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).
SZA’s unwavering commitment to her craft is already known; in the midst of public label issues with her long time record label TDE and her major-label partner RCA, she wrote hundreds of songs for what would become SOS; therefore, narrowing it down to just 23 songs is, in context, an exercise in restraint.
SZA’s song writing has improved significantly since the beautiful CTRL, and SOS serves as a tangible example of how she has expanded as a musician and lyricist. She assertively disregards genre conventions while firmly establishing herself in the R&B heritage.
Along with a vicious rap track that harkens back to the glory days of actual mixtapes (“Smokin on my Ex Pack”) and, perhaps strangely, a country song with a pop-punk chorus about revenge sex (“F2F”), she belts her face off on an immediate classic “fuck you” number (“I Hate U”).
This can occasionally fall into the middle, “Ghost in the Machine,” her eagerly anticipated collaboration with Phoebe Bridgers, finds them mimicking each other’s vocal tones over glitch electronica with synthetic harps provided by regular collaborators Rob Bisel and Carter Lang.
Furthermore, “Special,” a song on bodily dysmorphia, feels like it was written from a Swiftian persona, similar to her looseie “Joni,” but it comes off sounding a little trite when placed between a collection of songs where she richly expresses the same sentiment. It is a little taxing while also being impressive.
It takes more effort to listen to the entire album at once rather than dipping in and out since the tracks shine more brightly when heard individually than when heard collectively, where their sheer abundance causes them to melt into one while evoking a stoned melancholy mood.
In reality, SOS poses a problem to the listener: you can’t help but wish SZA had been more selective in the editing, but that raises the difficult question of what you would lose given the consistently great quality of what’s present. This isn’t the album’s only quandary. SZA has a strong, contradictory voice the entire time.
She is a fantastic singer, strong but unassuming, and she can effortlessly transition into what the Grammys refer to as melodic rap: a mellifluous sprechgesang with a flow that is laced with triplets that seem more influenced by Bone Thugs-n-Harmony than Migos.
However, the tone is generally depressing, even when the subject is not romantic misery. She alternates between pleading for privacy (“I need more space and security,” she says in “Gone Girl”) and seeking approval (“How do I deal with rejection?
“She ruminates on Far. Even the album’s guests highlight the tension, which is unmistakably made worse by popularity and success. Phoebe Bridgers laments, “You tell me my pals are on my payroll,” during her Ghost in the Machine feature, before acquiescing, “You’re not wrong… You’re an asshole.”
It wouldn’t be altogether unexpected if the album’s author disappeared from the public eye given the album’s emotional overtones. As awkward as it is, SOS gives you the impression that it would be pop’s loss if she did. It’s a nice thing even when there is too much of it.
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