This previous Christmas, a lady you knew in highschool recused herself from the household dinner desk, shut herself in her teenage bed room and, illuminated by the sunshine of her sundown lamp, despatched 13 back-to-back texts that every one turned inexperienced. All of the whereas, she screamed alongside to her new mantra: “My flip, mine to do the hurtin’/Your flip to bear the burdеn/My flip, ’trigger I deservе this.”
It was an early reward from SZA (which nonetheless managed to reach slightly late): 15 diaphanous new songs which are stunning however often as antagonistic as fiberglass mud, peaking with “My Flip,” a revenge anthem much less violent than 2022’s inescapable homicide fantasy “Kill Invoice” however no much less twisted. These songs are packaged with that yr’s mega-selling SOS beneath the title SOS Deluxe: Lana, however they operate higher on their very own: Not like the rambunctious, mixtape-y style hopping of its predecessor, Lana is aesthetically coherent, full of heat analog synths and soul-ballad tempos. There are fewer piquant quotables, however it feels much less jittery than SOS, nearer in tone to the SZA of 2017’s CTRL, who laid naked her fears and flaws with the informal have an effect on of a mannequin doing a “What’s in My Bag” video. Put these songs in their very own playlist and you may proudly name Lana the third SZA album—one worthy of its predecessors.
“My Flip” does a great deal of explaining why SZA, a bolder and weirder star than is often embraced by the pop firmament, ended up together with her identify connected to SOS, some of the profitable R&B data of all time. Except for, maybe, Charli XCX, SZA is the one pop star who really meets Our Second by itself phrases: She takes the emotional panorama of TikTok—a world the place remedy phrases are abused, nobody can agree which flags are crimson, and everyone seems to be “crashing out,” a favourite SZAism—and wraps it up in her personal form of pop classicism, a stew that on Lana accommodates components of Latin jazz, new age, psych-rock, soul, and ’90s R&B, amongst many different issues. This (on-paper) conflict of kind and performance signifies that SZA’s music feels each electrifyingly present and constructed to final—a stability a lot of her chart friends have struggled to strike.
However subsequent to each track that asserts some form of self-love by way of an act of emotional terrorism, SZA leaves an asterisk: She is incapable of sweeping her personal culpability beneath the rug. Not like Ariana Grande, whose newest album everlasting sunshine was full of ersatz remedy platitudes (and conspicuously freed from real battle), SZA lays naked the methods through which the thought of “searching for primary” can turn into a cope for poisonous conduct. “My Flip” is specific in its want to inflict ache; “Crybaby,” a stunning, sunkissed ballad the place SZA bemoans her incapability to cease “blaming the world for my faults,” ends with the dryly hilarious chorus, “I do know you informed tales about me/Most of them terrible, all of them true.” Many stars brandish “authenticity” hoping their followers might be too besotted to see it as one other form of costume; SZA pays for hers track by track, by no means condescending to her viewers.
