thread of SZA

yeah when I saw that many tracks my guess was that it was going to be structured like janet.

excited.

― ミ💙🅟 🅛 🅤 🅡 🅜 🅑💙彡 (Austin), Wednesday, November 30, 2022 9:30 PM

ya'll're crazy btw "shirt" is late entry soty status

such a good album

i haven't really given this a proper listen (just in bits & pieces throughout the day) but unsurprisingly it's less consistent & cohesive than ctrl but still quite good

first listen right now.

lol this is fucking stellar! wow!

some duds in the middle section, but man this is really good.

That sample on the opening title track sure is familiar 😉

Good album so far.

IMMA GET THAT DICK THAT I DESERVE

I appreciate how emo this gets

Guitars!

this is excellent and one of the best albums of the year. easy 4 mics, maybe 4.5.

early criticisms:

-it's too long. when i saw how many tracks there were, i assumed at least a handful would be interludes. nope. that said, the length is a catch 22. keeps the songs brief and allows for a ton of variety. saw some complaints about their inclusion elsewhere, but the familiarity of older favorites like "i hate u" and "good days" makes the album more listenable for me, idk. but yeah: some of those more milquetoast tracks in the middle could've been cut.

-not sure if this is a proper criticism, but her lyrics are all over the place. i know it's what she does, but it does makes the album feel a lot more cluttered than it is. however, just in terms of her voice, she sounds better than ever.

definitely mirrors the times. that whole thing in "shirt" about `going back on my word` after losing yourself (`feelin lost and i like it`) fucks with me. how many times recently have i done something that i knew was kind of fucked up but, like, FUCK IT, right? elsewhere she wants to kill her ex, but also just eat, sleep, and love. seems like a perfectly contradictory microcosm for the whole album. really good, really personal music from a really important voice. love love love.

My spirits did sink a little when U saw the track listing. But they're short things.

*when I

It IS too long, would be my main complaint - but then you think about how long it took for this to come out. She probably recorded so much, and she and the label wanted to pack the track list

In a better economy/marketplace maybe 8-10 of these would’ve been on a pre album mixtape or something

Lol @ this song "F2F" – it's like a mid-2000s pop single (not lyrically, tho)

i can't see this as anything other than an unambiguously great album, prob one of the best albums in years, will rightfully go down as a modern R&B touchstone. when the music is this good i can't really get w/ any argument about it being too long, if anything i wish it was longer. i don't think any song overstays its welcome... maybe the choir part on "good girl" but that song is so good otherwise that i don't really care. there's enough experimentation to keep things interesting but the POV of her songwriting is so clear and consistent that everything feels of a piece. it's just an all around triumph to me. (i also don't like ctrl all that much so maybe i'm crazy.)

naturally my head starts to go to what other records it reminds me of... janet albums come to mind in ethos. putting a rock song as track 13 is so very janet. but i thought a lot about jeremih too... the way in which she flows like a rapper but w/ melody and vocals that firmly root the music in R&B in a way that couldn't be mistaken w/ i.e. future or young thug or melodic rappers. there's a stylistic throughline for me from songs on late nights like "pass dat" and "impatient" to songs on this album like "low", "blind", "notice me", "conceited" etc. there's this kinda stream of consciousness effect to that kinda songwriting that i love.

i actually think the album gets stronger in the middle... "kill bill" and those early ones are cool but a few of them feel a little genre exercise-y to me where as "love language", "blind" etc are where this album finds its groove. i love "snooze" ... it has a certain babyface lightness of touch to it but you'd never know he produced it, she really bends him into the sound of this record. same thing w/ the benny blanco & shellback songs. there's just so much to love here for me.

first thought is that this is pretty excellent. some highlights for me: "low" (kind of like a travis scott song but with vocals that i actually enjoy listening to), "love language" (spacious, languid groove,great lyrics), "blind" (noname-esque stream of consciousness rhyming for two minutes before it flutters off), "notice me" (organ sound is so good! quavering vocals are the perfect accompaniment), and "gone girl" (i actually really like the choir part hah, it's a really grand moment in a record full of small, intimate ones).

i don't really think it's too long, but i might've ended the album at "shirt." tho the final few songs at the end do help ground the album back in an r&b space after going (with mixed results) to pop city for a few songs in the back half.

i don't really think it's too long, but i might've ended the album at "shirt."

i like "open arms" perhaps the only time i've ever enjoyed travis scott's voice. given where they are on the tracklist i'm fairly convinced she had no intention of putting "i hate u" or "good days" on the album and was told that she didn't really have a choice

i really like the travis scott collab and think of it as one of the highlights.

i'm starting to think of this as a double album in the same way that kendrick's mr. morale + the big steppers was "thematically" a double album. in that respect, disc one is basically flawless and the best run of songs on any new album i've heard in many years. i know we say this cliche every year around this time, but i really do feel like this has been a great year for new music — and to have it capped off with an album of this calibre from her is just so damn satisfying.

final word: 4.5 mics

She sounds more like Kehlani than ever.

"far" is punching my brain this morning. this fucking album.

I've had the new album on repeat since yesterday. Shit is absolute 🔥🔥🔥

yep.

and i have to say i hated "gone girl" the first couple times, but it's really growing on me. very cheesy, but also very classy.

highlight for me is “Seek & Destroy”

"“Ghost in the Machine" for me. Those lyrics are sharp.

`shirt` is not only the highlight of this album, it's also the best song of the year.

"is that your final answer?"

yes.

final answer.

where do december releases go in our ridiculous november year-end list culture? will this make it onto the best of 2023 lists?

anyway album rules

it should be on both 2022 + 2023 lists.

it's that good.

bjork sampling ODB track at the end. things you didn't know you needed.

whole thing is some perfect grey Sunday with a dusting of snow shit

i actually think the album gets stronger in the middle

― J0rdan S., Friday, December 9, 2022 2:09 PM (three days ago) bookmarkflaglink

Agreed. "Notice Me," "F2F," and "Conceited" are stand outs.

lol @ everyone who made their year-end lists before hearing this.

Last week both of my kids separately asked me if I'd heard this yet, and yesterday a buddy called me asking for advice about buying tickets for *his* daughter to see SZA, so clearly there's a lot of SZA in the air. People want their SZA! I gotta get on this album, haven't really thought about her since I saw her play a small place in ... 2017? And even then she seemed ascendant.

“Kill Bill” is amazing.

finally listened to half of this last night, concur, Kill Bill amazing, rest of the record really great, weird they held this back so long and difficult to parse out what the truth was about the delay from anything anyone has said.

some of the album was only finished just before release, but i think the main reasons it took so long were her lacking confidence in her material & her label refusing to release things even when she wanted to

didn’t she have serious problems with her vocal cords at some point?

looking it up that was in 2018 after she toured ctrl, so idk how much that contributed to delays

she has spoken a lot about how being a famous musician gives her an extreme amount of anxiety. she has also spoken about hating the process of releasing music according to a schedule, having to plan out singles with a label and all that instead of just putting songs out when she wants. the guys who run TDE have talked about feeling like they needed to take control of the release process from her. both sides have spoken about not seeing eye to eye on a lot of things. i think it’s pretty easy to connect the dots and understand why her music came out in fits and starts before an album just suddenly appeared out of nowhere.

they also sat on Kendrick's stuff for ages, no? I'm not sure exactly what that label is thinking.

i’m not sure if her and kendrick have similar issues in that regard. i think kendrick albums just take a long time to make. but he’s also leaving TDE after this album so perhaps it’s not the easiest place to be an artist

to me sza seems to be in the lineage of the whole generation of neo soul artists who eventually came to release music at their own pace — often on timelines that frustrated their fans. if you read this recent story it feels like it wouldn’t be that shocking if she disappeared from the public eye for a long time a la lauryn hill, d’angelo etc

https://consequence.net/cover/sza-cover-story-sos/

ctrl also had a long gestation (though not as long) with similar issues - she repeatedly complained that tde was delaying things, but also got really anxious and lost confidence in what she'd recorded amongst all the delays and couldn't decide what she wanted the album to be so eventually they just took her hard drive and decided on the tracklist without consulting her.

it just doesn't really seem like they're a good fit for each other - her process seems really dysfunctional overall but if anything tde seems to exacerbate a lot of that by trying to do everything properly

kendrick seems like he's always had a pretty firm vision of what he wants to do so i don't think he'd have been likely to have run into the same issues with tde. he's also surely just outgrown them

Well deserved.

https://pitchfork.com/news/sza-scores-first-no-1-album-with-sos/

Love the run from Used to Gone Girl that includes the lovely and effortless Babyface track Snooze. Thought it was interesting that Rob Bisel, the dominant producer/musical collaborator, didn't have a wikipedia page. Seems to mostly been an engineer/mixer before this record: https://www.robbisel.com/