(Top Dawg Entertainment/RCA)
The US star’s follow-up to her groundbreaking debut ranges wildly, from pop-punk to traces of Radiohead and a Phoebe Bridgers feature. You’d give it a trim were the quality not so unerringly high
Last week, SZA released the cover of her second album, SOS. A photo of her perched on a long diving board in the middle of the ocean, it turned into a global news story, reported everywhere from the website of the National Hockey League, which approved of the St Louis Blues jersey she was wearing, to the Daily Mail, which reacted very much as you might expect the Daily Mail to react when a Black artist appears in a photo apparently modelled on a paparazzo shot of Diana, Princess of Wales, taken days before her death.
If it all seemed a bit overheated, perhaps SZA’s second album was always bound to attract attention regardless of its sleeve, and not merely because it follows Ctrl, one of the most acclaimed debuts of the 2010s. That album announced the arrival of an artist willing to push at the boundaries of R&B: defiantly experimental, it sold 3m copies in the US alone. It’s that SOS has been a very long time coming. Its lead single, Good Days, was released two years ago. A second, I Hate U, appeared on SoundCloud in the summer of 2021, apparently on the say-so of SZA’s astrologer. Potential release dates came and went. In May, she announced the album was “ready to go”, promising “a SZA summer”. Two months later, she suggested her label was withholding the album against her wishes, but more recently claimed to be “stressed” about meeting even a December deadline. Moreover, she keeps hinting that the album will be her last. She is “emotionally, energetically unequipped” for fame: “I could burst into tears … I am effectively falling apart,” she told a journalist last month, which hardly bodes well for the rest of the promotional cycle.