SOS is captivatingly messy, not just in its sad, funny, sexually frank lyrics, but in its production, which makes room for a country-emo hybrid, 90s-indebted rap, and plugs samples of Björk and Ol’ Dirty Bastard into the same song. The songs that had been holding Kill Bill from the top spot, Morgan Wallen’s Last Night and Miley Cyrus’s Flowers, feel boilerplate in their emotion, presenting easily digestible versions of post-breakup sadness and post-breakup empowerment respectively. SZA’s success feels like a win for a kind of pop music that’s in short supply right now. The album spent nine weeks at No 1 on the Billboard 200, making it the longest-charting No 1 by a woman since Adele’s 25 seven years before, despite not yet being available in any physical formats. This week, the song finally hit No 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 after a long run in the Top 5, nearly five months on from the release of SOS. I heard SOS at a listening session a week before its release, and when Kill Bill concluded – with SZA’s emphatic “Rather be in hell than alone” – you could hear much of those in attendance let out an audible “oof”. Although named for the Quentin Tarantino film, Kill Bill’s revenge fantasy provides no real emotional payoff its narrative is a cry of pure fatalism, with no return for its narrator other than a split-second of bloodlust.
The production is plush, comically light, gilded with soft doo-wop harmonies, but the lyrics are brazen, galvanised and monomaniacal. It’s an unapologetic, avowedly sober murder ballad, in which SZA sings over a diffuse boom-bap beat about killing her ex-boyfriend so that no other woman can ever have him. Case in point: Kill Bill, the album’s calling-card, is hardly your typical pop radio fare. It makes sense that she would have an inclination towards self-protection: SOS contains some of the most intense, emotionally scabrous music to grace the UK or US charts in a long time. These are distancing devices – ways for the 33-year-old musician to armour herself against the leery intensity of fame. In even her most glammed-up press shot, she is splattered with blood in another, she’s coated in a thick film of mud, and on the cover of her second album, the emotional bombshell that is SOS, she sits with her back facing the camera, looking out on a vast ocean, in a nod to a famed paparazzi shot of Princess Diana.
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