SZA - ‘SOS’ - album review
SZA - SOS (HIVE)
Five years without a release in music seems like an age – Solána Rowe, better known as singer-songwriter SZA, knows this all too well. Though she hasn’t been entirely missing from the mainstream since the release of her triple platinum debut album CTRL in 2017, fans have found themselves desperate for a more long form release from the New-Jersey native. The 16 singles and collaboration tracks released in this time, including the Oscar-nominated ‘All The Stars’, could produce an album in of itself but have proved not to sate the appetite of ravenous fans but instead add fuel to the fire of longing.
Coming in at a massive 23 tracks, it’s a worry that SOS may be a dump of any unreleased material SZA has accumulated over the past five years, or even act as an SOS call but it instead it begins to switch between ideas of both experimentation and disjointedness.
SOS begins with a morse code message of, you’ve guessed it, ‘SOS’. While it may not serve as the overly impressive reintroduction to an artist that has been sorely missed, it gives us a small glimpse into some of her vocal talents as we are greeted with her reverb laden voice that is paired perfectly with a choir vocal sample. This medley fades perfectly into ‘Kill Bill’, a track that emulates some of the most loved and well-known aspects of 90s hip-hop and rap music. It features an echoey guitar lick that repeats throughout and provides the perfect backdrop to her melancholic and reflective vocals as she performs; “I might kill my ex / I still love him, though / Rather be in jail than alone”.
Only in an album like SOS could SZA get away with the collaborations that she has included. Not only does the album feature Travis Scott on Open Arms, a slow jam that would provide the perfect soundtrack to a rainy winter's night over the next few weeks, but also alternative music’s ‘it girl’ Phoebe Bridgers on ‘Ghost in the Machine’. This track finds them imitating each other's vocals over an electronic harp, Bridgers’ raspy vocals marrying perfectly with SZA’s, providing the missing partner that they both so desperately needed – it just seemed that nobody realized this until right now. The genre blending continues with ‘F2F’, a classic pop punk song that wouldn’t sound entirely out of place on the soundtrack to an early noughties film like Mean Girls or Freaky Friday. SZA has really utilized this genre and its sudden resurgence in popularity to her advantage, playing off the admiration fans have for new acts like Olivia Rodrigo and the massive popularity boost of those well-known ‘emo’ bands that we all love.
At its core, SOS is a chance for SZA to show how truly versatile she is. She refuses to play by the traditional formulas of genre and instead chooses to blend sharp and personal lyrics with a range of different genres to create her own unique soundscape. This album truly has something for everyone, even if it is just a single track, with the beautiful melancholic acoustics of ‘Nobody Gets Me’, to the mainstream radio-friendly R&B of ‘I Hate U’ – whether you’ve been with SZA from her humble beginnings with her debut EP in 2012, or whether you found her music through a viral TikTok video, her intimate and relatable lyricism and multifaceted sound throughout this album means that there will no doubt be something for you to sink your teeth into.
Rating: 4/5
