Some of the best SZA songs sound like buzzed rants to yourself in the mirror—dissociative and confrontational, hitting truths a little too raw to handle sober. “Why can’t I stay alone just by myself? Wish I was comfortable just myself,” she lamented on CTRL opener “Supermodel,” torching a relationship but still unable to move on. On “Drew Barrymore”: “I get so lonely I forget what I’m worth.” Half a decade later, SZA’s still hooking up with exes she has no business entertaining and cringing at the aftermath, craving the self-sufficiency that would save her grief. The reputational damage lingers like a hangover: “My past can’t escape me/My pussy precedes me,” she sings on “Blind,” a dazzling statement piece from her new album SOS. Fuck! They hate to see a sexually liberated woman from New Jersey winning.
SZA is as real and stylistically electric as ever on “Blind,” musing over lush violins and the delicate guitars of a Sufjan Stevens song, which tiptoe like a ballerina en pointe. How long will vulnerability be rewarded with abandonment? Where is the haven for intense women to rest their weary minds? She rounds the same corners, unable to resist a man’s toxic antics or a good ’90s reference; she is humiliated for being and desiring too much. “It’s so embarrassing/All of the things I need living inside of me,” she sings. Cascading down vocal runs in her golden falsetto, SZA alchemizes beauty from turmoil, turning delusion and obliviousness into divine revelation.
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