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Last year, New Zealand singer Lorde opened her third studio album, Solar Power, by outrightly rejecting the role that many fans have assigned to her on the internet as an omniscient guru/Messiah for millennials and Gen-Zers. “Well, if you’re looking for a savior, that’s not me,” she announced on “The Path.” No shade to the brilliant 26-year-old—the Lorde Hive is borderline cultish—but it’s SZA, a slightly older yet newer female voice in mainstream music, who has always struck me as the more popular candidate for this magisterial position.
Since her massive debut album CTRL in 2017, the 33-year-old singer (whose real name is Solana Rowe) has spent most of her career encouraging young, mainly Black women to be their baddest, freest selves while embracing the messiness that comes with navigating relationships (or “situationships”) and achieving self-love. Her emotionally raw, occasionally funny content on that album exposed a frustrating and relieving conundrum about getting through adulthood. By admitting she didn’t have the answers, she sort of did.
That recipe of confidence, confusion, self-loathing, and self-involvement made SZA’s Grammy-nominated debut not only a certified R&B staple but a sacred text to modern women plagued by the loneliness of social media and the elusiveness of online dating. Much has changed about the world in the five-plus years since she’s released a full body of work, yet her devoted legion of Very Online fans—maybe experiencing a prolonged moment of stasis during a pandemic—have been demanding the same level of transgressiveness on the followup to CTRL. Ahead of the release of her sophomore album, SOS, on Friday, one Twitter user wrote, “I better not see any growth or maturity on this sza album tonight.”