While it might sound inherently contradictory, to express vulnerability in one’s music requires a degree of confidence. Locating a middle ground between assuredness and fragility, a sweet spot of purified authenticity, is a line SZA regularly straddles on her sophomore effort, SOS, an unwieldy, unruly, and, at times, deeply beautiful album.
Across 23 tracks, the line between definiteness and doubt is so frequently crossed that, after a while, the two emotional states feel as if they’re beginning to blur into one another. On tracks like the candid “Kill Bill” and “I Hate You,” SZA finds deceptive ways to fold fraught, lived-in turmoil into her lyrics, which are primarily concerned with dressing down former lovers with little regard for societal pleasantries, cutting straight to the bone.
The former track, whose title nods to Quentin Tarantino’s two-part murder-revenge fantasy, finds SZA musing about how she “might” just kill her ex, and that “his new girlfriend’s next.” The song plays with the idea of love and hatred existing closer on the emotional spectrum than one might imagine; when she repeats the phrase “I might kill my ex” later on in the chorus, she follows it with “I still love him though.” She even admits she’d rather be in jail than “be alone,” a blunt admission of raw honesty that pierces harder than any other threat that’s come before.
Calling to mind the mercurial, kitchen-sink production of Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk, SOS’s playful approach to genre-swapping carries a defined sense of artistic freedom across its varied tracklist. Not every experiment is a success—the wispy alternative elements of “Ghost in the Machine,” chiefly its indietronica instrumentation and unnecessary Pheobe Bridgers guest spot, never really cohere—but the album doesn’t linger on any one specific style or mood for too long.
In particular, SOS’s soggy middle section benefits from a few quick blasts of catharsis—the smoldering swagger of “Smoking on My Ex Pack” and the gloriously stupid, pop-punk-flavored “F2F”—in between some of the more cleanly produced selections like “Gone Girl,” which feels like a wannabe Bruno Mars song in disguise, and the aseptically produced “Special.” Still, up to that point, the album’s first nine tracks constitute one of the stronger runs on a mainstream R&B album this year, and “Forgiveless” manages to harmoniously jerry-rig a posthumous Ol’ Dirty Bastard freestyle over a sample of Björk’s “Hidden Place.”
Like SZA herself, SOS seems to be in a state of constant flux, operating at times on what seems to be a total whim. The belligerent, trap-influenced “Low,” where SZA lowers her own voice down to a husky whisper over the track’s pre-chorus to mumble out how “in the bedroom, I be screamin’, but outside, I keep it quiet,” sits comfortably right next to standard slow jams such as “Love Language” and “Snooze,” the latter of which features a timeless Babyface-credited hook: “I can’t just snooze and miss the moment/You just too important.” Even as things might seem to be getting out of hand, SZA still manages to find comfort through all of the chaos.
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