SZA’s ascent from cult favorite to one of the biggest stars in music happened slowly and then all at once, in the way that things always seem to when the artist is actually good. Ctrl in 2017 established her as something genuinely new in R&B – vulnerable without being fragile, experimental without being inaccessible. It took the mainstream a few more years to fully catch up with what her existing listeners already knew.
SOS, released in late 2022, broke streaming records and did it while sounding like an album that wasn’t interested in breaking streaming records. It was messy in the best sense – sprawling, sometimes contradictory, occasionally self-indulgent in ways that made it feel more human than human. SZA doesn’t make albums that make sense as calculated career moves. She makes albums that sound like how she actually feels, which is rarer than it should be at her level.
Her cover of the Goo Goo Dolls’ “Iris” this week is a perfect example of how she operates. The song has had a resurgent moment in the cultural conversation, and SZA didn’t try to reimagine it or deconstruct it. She just sang it, with full commitment, and that was enough. The voice is the instrument. The instrument is extraordinary.
What makes SZA matter beyond the charts is that she represents a specific kind of Black womanhood in pop music that hasn’t always had this level of commercial space – complicated, non-linear, unwilling to flatten itself into something easier to market. Ctrl explored anxiety and desire with specificity. SOS expanded the canvas but kept the honesty.
She’s one of the best songwriters working in pop and R&B right now. The numbers finally caught up to the talent, which doesn’t happen often enough to take for granted.