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This past Christmas, a girl you knew in high school recused herself from the family dinner table, shut herself in her teenage bedroom and, illuminated by the light of her sunset lamp, sent 13 back-to-back texts that all turned green. All the while, she screamed along to her new mantra: “My turn, mine to do the hurtin’/Your turn to bear the burdеn/My turn, ’cause I deservе this.”It was an early gift from SZA (which still managed to arrive a little late): 15 diaphanous new songs that are beautiful but frequently as antagonistic as fiberglass dust, peaking with “My Turn,” a revenge anthem less violent than 2022’s inescapable murder fantasy “Kill Bill” but no less twisted. These songs are packaged with that year’s mega-selling SOS under the title SOS Deluxe: Lana, but they function better on their own: Unlike the rambunctious, mixtape-y genre hopping of its predecessor, Lana is aesthetically coherent, filled with warm analog synths and soul-ballad tempos. There are fewer piquant quotables, but it feels less jittery than SOS, closer in tone to the SZA of 2017’s CTRL, who laid bare her fears and flaws with the casual affect of a model doing a “What’s in My Bag” video. Put these songs in their own playlist and you can proudly call Lana the third SZA album—one worthy of its predecessors.“My Turn” does a good deal of explaining why SZA, a bolder and weirder star than is usually embraced by the pop firmament, ended up with her name attached to SOS, one of the most successful R&B records of all time. Aside from, perhaps, Charli XCX, SZA is the only pop star who truly meets Our Moment on its own terms: She takes the emotional landscape of TikTok—a world where therapy terms are abused, no one can agree which flags are red, and everyone is “crashing out,” a favorite SZAism—and wraps it up in her own kind of pop classicism, a stew that on Lana contains elements of Latin jazz, new age, psych-rock, soul, and ’90s R&B, among many other things. This (on-paper) clash of form and function means that SZA’s music feels both electrifyingly current and built to last—a balance many of her chart peers have struggled to strike.But next to every song that asserts some kind of self-love through an act of emotional terrorism, SZA leaves an asterisk: She is incapable of sweeping her own culpability under the rug. Unlike Ariana Grande, whose latest album eternal sunshine was filled with ersatz therapy platitudes (and conspicuously free of genuine conflict), SZA lays bare the ways in which the idea of “looking out for number one” can become a cope for toxic behavior. “My Turn” is explicit in its desire to inflict pain; “Crybaby,” a gorgeous, sunkissed ballad where SZA bemoans her inability to stop “blaming the world for my faults,” ends with the dryly hilarious refrain, “I know you told stories about me/Most of them awful, all of them true.” Many stars brandish “authenticity” hoping their fans will be too besotted to see it as another kind of costume; SZA pays for hers song by song, never condescending to her audience.
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