Album Review: SZA - SOS

The first thing that Solána Rowe asks for is more time.

But the first thing you hear in the titular track to the album SOS is, fittingly, the Morse Code signal for distress—a short, frenetic series of dots and dashes, followed by the sound of a flare gun being shot out into the distance. 

The first thing Rowe, the artist we know as SZA, asks for at the beginning of her second full-length, is more time.

But what you hear before this ask, and after the introductory sound effects that lead us into the song, is a warbled, distended sample of “Until I Found The Lord (My Soul Couldn’t Rest),” from the 1975 self-titled album from The Gabriel Hardeman Delegation—and it is hard to tell, due to the production of “SOS,” just how much of the original song is included in the sample—tightly woven, yes, into the fabric of the track, but buried and muffled underneath Rowe’s vocals, but what you can clearly make out, from the sample of “Until I Found The Lord,” is the phrase, “Last night I cried….”

The first thing that Rowe asks for is more time.

“Give me a second—give me a minute,” she says with a palpable sense of urgency in the way its delivered, but what I am wondering now is if she, herself, is actually asking for this time, or if she is addressing, or rather confronting, someone else—someone who wants more time from her.

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And I find that I am thinking about time, and about distance, about the need for control, and the difficulties one may find when you ultimately ask for help.

In a conversation, shortly before the release of SOS, I asked my friend Alyssa if she liked, or was familiar with any of Rowe’s debut full-length, 2017’s CTRL—and within that conversation, I explained that yes, I did legitimately love the album and that it was one of my favorites from that year, but one of the things that I found fascinating about Rowe as a performer is what I described at that moment as her “reluctance.”

Rowe, as SZA, began issuing music roughly a decade ago—two digital, self-released EPs in 2012 and 2013, followed by her first outing with Top Dawg Entertainment, Z, in the spring of 2014. 

It is fitting, I suppose, that Rowe titled her debut CTRL, because, outside of it being a theme that runs through vignettes tacked on in-between tracks as the album unfolds, it is control that she did not want to give up in terms of the creation and inevitably the completion of the album. Rowe recorded between 150 and 200 songs, overworking many of them, and scrapping even more of them through perpetually second-guessing herself during the recording processes. Sessions for CTRL, off and on, spanned over two years—the album’s Wikipedia describes the laborious nature of the album’s creation due to Rowe’s “blinding paralysis brought on by anxiety,” with representatives from her label eventually (allegedly) confiscating the hard drive the sessions were stored on. 

CTRL’s follow-up, SOS, went through just as long of a gestation process, but regardless of what might have contributed to that, what I find so compelling about Rowe is the mythology she has built around herself, specifically w/r/t the mercurial and volatile relationship she has with executives at Top Dawg Entertainment.

The label’s history dates back much earlier than I had expected—it didn’t really begin to find traction until the mid to late 2000s, then becoming what it is today a decade ago following the release of Kendrick Lamar’s breakthrough Good Kid, M.A.A.D City in 2012. And Rowe’s experiences with Top Dawg have nearly always been tumultuous—around the end of 2016, well before the release of CTRL, Rowe tweeted (and then deleted), “I actually quit.” Tagging the label’s president Terrence Henderson, she continued that he could release her album “if he ever feels like it.” 

She shared similar sentiments in the summer of 2020, when she again suggested the label was behind the delay in releasing any new music. “At this point, y’all gotta ask punch,” she said on Twitter—“Punch,” being Henderson’s nickname. “I’ve done all I can do.” 

She continued by implying a hostile relationship between herself and the label president, and that he had been dismissive in answering questions about when her new material would, and could, be released. 

And I realize that, perhaps, the word “reluctance,” or describing Rowe as a reluctant performer, is not entirely accurate, but it is also not incorrect, and that reluctance finds a connection, intentional or not, to the titles of her albums and the conceits threaded through each—the reluctance to give up control, and the reluctance to ask for assistance. 

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The first thing that Rowe asks for as SOS opens is more time.

She asks for a second, then a minute, and we, as the listeners, along for this journey, have no choice but to give those to her—we give her, in the end, around 68 minutes. Exponentially longer than its predecessor, SOS is a sprawling affair—23 tracks total, many of which do not pass the three-minute mark—and it is structured to reveal more and more of itself the further into the album you wade.

And it is something that I noticed during my initial listen of SOS, and it is something that I noticed more and more with each subsequent sitting, but regardless of where it might falter (it happens), or where it finds success (there is an incredible run halfway through), the noticeably deliberate way the album is paced is extremely admirable. There are moments where the album plays like a house on fire—there is urgency and a buoyancy with which Rowe delivers her lyrics, preternaturally gliding between singing and rapping; but then there are other moments when things begin to, perhaps intentionally, slow down—maybe not as much in terms of Rowe’s dynamism as a performer, and clever writer, but for sure in terms of the specific arrangements and production—and this is a detail that I found frustrating, and it is a facet of the album that at times, can make SOS feel a little slow, or weighed down, and I found that if I was not in the absolute right frame of mind to really sit with the album, its length and dips in energy could become a bit of a test in patience.

CTRL was not exactly a concept album—rather a collection of songs that had the loose thread of the idea of “control” strung through it, and SOS is similar in a sense that it, too, is not a concept album, but it has the idea of asking and being accepting of help, or the need, and want, for being “saved,” as it were, can both be found in places throughout.

And for as mercurial as Rowe, as a person, can present herself to be, at least in terms of her relationship with the executives at the label she is signed to, it should not be surprising that her mercurial, volatile nature has found its way into her lyricism—there are songs about love, yes, and maybe they are better described as songs about lust. And Rowe is not just writing from one end of the spectrum—there are embittered, revenge-fueled breakup songs as well, but it is the distance between those two extremes that Rowe often places herself, oscillating between both the love and hate for another certainly, but the album is at its most compelling and Rowe is at her most thought-provoking as an artist, when she is navigating the love and hate for herself. 

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The first thing that Rowe asks for as SOS opens is more time. However, immediately after she asks for it, the titular track begins to take confrontational, antagonistic turns—“Give me a second—give me a minute,” she demands in the opening line. “Nah, lil’ bitch, can’t let you finish.”

Across SOS’s sprawling tracklist, there are three specific moments where Rowe really demonstrates her abilities as a rapper—“SOS” is one of them. And what these songs have in common is that there is a ferocity to the way she steps to the microphone and is unwavering in her command over it. And it is not that these moments seem out of place within the context of the album as a whole, but their tone is much more emergent—like these words cannot leave her mouth fast enough, giving them a loose, energized, freestyled feeling.

“SOS,” in a sense, is a reminder, or a reintroduction, though Rowe is the kind of artist who, following the arrival and subsequent buzz around CTRL, is really in no need of one—yes, five years in between albums, in the current market of contemporary popular music, is a long time, but she has remained busy, or at least present enough that nobody, if they were paying attention, would have forgotten her name or her talent.

“This ain’t no warning shot,” Rowe attests the further she gets into “SOS,” barely coming up for air in between her lyrics. “Case all you hoes forgot. Know you been more than lost without me.” Then, later, she becomes even more boastful in her candor—“Ain’t no writers—that’s just me. Ain’t no spiteful—I’m just tea. Can’t hate a bitch for free—talkin’ I’m off the bench like Brady.” 

Musically, “SOS” is among the songs that have, in the weeks after the album’s release, has been on the receiving end of criticism for its production—on Twitter, someone described the record as sounding like it was being played off of the speaker of a phone from the room next door to yours. I, in good faith, am unable to be that critical of it, but there is something about it that seems warbled and far away—and what I am uncertain of is if this is simply due to a rush to complete the album to meet its early December release date, or if this is what music, meant for consumption in a digital age, through streaming services, might just sound like—compressed, and like there is a layer of depth that is missing.

This production issue doesn’t impact every song on the record—the next, seemingly off-the-cuff track, “Blind,” is musically underscored by glistening, gentle acoustic guitar string plucks, and sweeping string accompaniment, creating a hypnotic, dreamy bed for Rowe’s half-rapped, half-sung vocals to coast just over the top of. “I ain’t no Julia Stiles, this ain’t no last dance–way past it,” she says, in one of the more clever, attention-grabbing lines on the album. “My past can’t escape me,” she continues. “My pussy precedes me. My, my, how the times change. I’m still playin’ the victim, and you still playin’ the pick-me.”

“SOS” and “Blind” are sequenced relatively close to one another near the top of the record, and the last of these blistering, looser, or more freewheeling kind of songs lean heavily into Rowe’s prowess as a rapper—“Smoking on My Ex Pack,” is placed within the center of the record, sandwiched within some of the finest, most compelling moments on SOS. 

“Smoking On My Ex Pack” is an unrelenting 80 seconds in length, and Rowe barely gives herself a chance to take a breath, or a break, while rapidly firing her lyrics. It’s one sprawling verse, one frenetic chorus, and then that’s it. Its length, and the way it just kind of fades away into a completely unrelated song follows it (also, a huge shift in tone) makes it feel like an interlude, or a little unfinished and rushed. Could it have possibly been developed into a longer track with a little more focus? Maybe. But Rowe also knows not to wear out her welcome with it—and of these three shorter songs, it is perhaps the most chaotic in how the lyrics are delivered, emphasized, and punctuated—all of it underscored by rumbling bass, and a rhythm that borders on jubilant sounding, from a sped-up sample of the 1981 slow jam, “Open Up Your Eyes,” by Webster Lewis. 

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Perhaps for different reasons not related to feeling anxious and overwhelmed at the notion of constructing the album, but the process of getting SOS out into the world, similar to CTRL, was a long one—beginning roughly two years ago, after Rowe’s incendiary tweets about her label holding up, the non-album single “Hit Different” arrived in the autumn of 2020, followed by “Good Days,” issued on Christmas Day; it, as well as “I Hate U,” which was released as a single a year later, are both included on the tracklist of SOS, near the end of the album’s run. 

There is an interesting melody buried somewhere in “I Hate U,” but its production values—a chintzy-sounding drum machine and an even chintzier-sounding keyboard, with Rowe’s vocals drowning in Auto-Tune waves and buried in a cavernous kind of sound, make it the less compelling of these two very early singles from SOS. 

“Good Days,” however, earns its place on the record, and it does feel a little like an afterthought that both songs are tacked on within minutes of the album’s conclusion. Built around dreamy, woozy, and shimmering guitar string plucks and swirling atmospherics, both musically and vocally, it is one of the more inherently beautiful moments on SOS. 

And for as pensive, and poignantly self-reflective as Rowe is in her lyricism on “Good Days”—“I’ve been on my empty mind shit,” she confesses in the first verse before becoming even more honest—“I try to keep from losing’ the rest of me. I worry that I wasted the best of me on you, babe”—there is still a very surprising amount of hope that ripples to the surface in the chorus: “Still wanna try, still believe in good days,” she sings, her voice blending with guest vocalist Jacob Collier. “Good days, always inside—always in my mind.”

Also finding its place near the record's final moments is “Shirt,”—which was released as a single around two months before SOS’s arrival in full, but a song that, like “Good Days,” dates back two years. A preview of it appeared in an Instagram story in October of 2020—then still untitled, that portion of the song began circulating on TikTok in early 2021 as part of a dance challenge—a small portion of the song was also included as an eerie epilogue to the video for “Good Days.”

Heavy on the bass and atmospheric tones that surge through “Shirt,” the song is minimalistic in terms of its percussion—a skittering, clattering drum beat forms the rhythm that Rowe’s vocals float above. The song itself, while surprisingly infectious in the melody from its chorus, and hypnotically arranged overall, is one of the darkest sonically—there is something creeping and unsettling about it, and the lyrics that Rowe sings in the first lines of the chorus certainly do not help make it any less uneasy to hear: “Bloodstain on my shirt. New bitch on my nerves.” 

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Regardless of if SOS is moving so fast you, as the listener, are barely able to keep up with its gait, or when it is slowed down to the point where it begins to test patience, it is undeniable how razor sharp Rowe’s lyrics can be, with lines throughout that demand your attention, and often breeze by so quickly you find yourself asking if you heard her correctly.

Moving from the bravado of the titular, opening track, Rowe slides into the tension of the revenge fantasy fueled “Kill Bill,” where, right before the violence implied in the chorus, she coos, “I’m so mature—I got me a therapist to tell me there’s other men. I don’t want none,” she concedes. “I just want you. If I can’t have you, no one should.”

Across SOS, Rowe oscillates and spirals through tumultuous depictions of romance—love and lust, sure, but also anger and self-deprecation in the wake of a relationship’s demise. “Seek and Destroy,” arriving early in the album’s sequence, is one of many where she turns her razor-sharp lyricism onto herself. “Now that I’ve ruined everything, I cannot complain,” she exclaims. “Now that I’ve ruined everything, I’m so fucking free. Now that I’ve ruined everything, keep it all for me. Now that I’ve ruined everything, space is all I need."

These sentiments continue in the album’s second half, on “Special,” where Rowe seemingly refers to something that she desperately pleaded for on CTRL’s track, “Normal Girl.” Five years ago, she wished to be the titular “normal girl,” though now, at least within her ruminations on “Special,” she wants something more. “Hate how you look at her ‘cause you never saw me,” she sings in the first verse after being unable to cease comparisons to another woman. “Like I was a piece of art, like I was an ordinary girl.”

“I wish I was special—I gave all my special away to a loser,” she sings in the song’s extremely bleak chorus. “Now I’m just a loser. I used to be special, but you made me hate me—regret that I changed me. I hate that you changed me, just like you.”

Toward the end of the album, Rowe continues exploring those feelings on “Far,” which is, at least musically, is among SOS’s slower, or at least much less enthusiastically arranged tunes, but the observations she makes about herself within the chorus are the kind that certainly resonates: “Far, like I don’t recognize me—far, ‘cause I let you define me.”

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Even if the length, and ultimately the pacing overall of SOS cause the project to buckle under its own sheer ambition, Rowe hits a run of around four songs, near the middle of the record, that is simply incredible in terms of their originality and how they exemplify the diversity and eclecticism of Rowe’s influences and abilities.

Rowe is now 33—and one could make an argument that while she certainly grew up, or aged, during the early to mid-1990s, she was so young that she did not exactly grow up cognitively aware of R&B and, of all things, a pop-leaning alternative rock sound, that was prevalent in the early to mid portion of the decade. However, both of those genres, or styles, or influences, or whatever you want to refer to them as, play a major role in some of the finest material on SOS.

“Gone Girl” is slow in tempo, yes, but there is a lot more happening, and it is far more interesting of a listen when compared to any of the other slower-tempo songs on the album. Set to a melancholic piano arrangement, Rowe’s vocal performance is both full of sorrow, and full of soul—there is a very palpable soulfulness to this song, making it a very clear and welcome homage to the kind of R&B that dominated MTV’s airwaves in the early 90s. 

Lyrically, “Gone Girl” is boiling over with a sense of longing that is surprisingly tender in how it is depicted—especially in comparison to the way Rowe writes about love, lust, and romance elsewhere on SOS. “I need more space and security,” she asks in the moments that lead up to the chorus. “I need less voices—just you and me. I need your touch, not your scrutiny.”

It is in the second verse, where the music begins to swell a little more underneath her, where Rowe delivers some of the more personal, and lingering, lyrics from the entire album: “I decide what demons I digest. Almost tired of repeatin’—I digress. Tryna find deeper meanin’ in the nonsense. Tryna grow without hating the process. Tiredd of anticipating the worst yet still anticipating the worst.”

Rowe’s interest in a very infectious, playful kind of alternative pop harkening back to a different era should not really be all that surprising based on the dazzling, smoldering arranging of the song “Drew Barrymore,” from CTRL—a tune that she admittedly wanted to make sound like it could be played over the ending credits of a teenage coming of age/romantic comedy from the late 1990s. So the direction and detail within “F2F” should not have been as surprising to hear as it was.

With a lot harder of an edge, musically, than “Drew Barrymore,” or really anything else Rowe has done up until this point, at least once it arrives at its anthemic chorus, the electric guitars that power “F2F are crunchy and snarling, and they are backed by pummeling drums and a throbbing bass line. This bright, powerful arranging at just the right moments in “F2F” is offset by the dreamy, swooning acoustic guitar progression it opens with, and the extremely whimsical keyboard noises that come between the chorus and the next verse—sounding like they were pulled straight from an alternative rock hit from 1998 or 99. 

Rowe makes her way through “F2F’ without a shred of irony, though—specifically when it comes to her writing: “Now I’m ovulating, and I need rough sex,” she sings without a hint of laughter in her voice at just how audacious of a lyric it is, then oscillating between the spite she feels for her ex, and the visceral loathing she feels toward herself in the shout-a-long chorus: “I get a kick out of missing your call,” she exclaims, quickly following it with, “I hate me enough for the two of us.”

SOS doubles down in a sense on Rowe’s influence and interest in the 90s and the exploration of an alternative rock, or at least alternative pop sound, with “Nobody Gets Me,” which is the kind of enormous, heartfelt ballad that is not exactly unexpected form an artist as dynamic as Rowe is, but it is nevertheless a surprise. Set to a kind of hazy, swirling tempo, the acoustic guitar returns again, but this time it is tucked underneath this really fascinating, delayed, wavy, plunking sound that drops the melody into the song’s structure. 

“Nobody Gets Me” burns slow at first before Rowe really goes for it and belts it out, and, again, never cracking a smile or breaking character at the kind of unflinching and, at times, brazen lyrics she’s written—“Took a long vacation—no make-up, just Jay-Z,” she begins with a shadow of sorrow in her voice. “You were balls-deep now we beefin’. Had me butt-naked at the MGM, so wasted, screamin’ ‘Fuck That.’”

Love, lust, and heartbreak are depicted in myriad ways throughout SOS, but this might be the one time when Rowe drops the kind of spiteful attitude she has elsewhere in her songs that are about the end of a relationship, because on “Nobody Gets Me,” there is the feeling of fear, and a terrible, desperate pleading that comes in the stirring, sweeping chorus. “I don’t wanna lose what’s left of you,” she confesses. “How am I supposed to tell you I don’t wanna see you with anyone but me? Nobody gets me like you. How am I supposed to let you go? Only like me when I’m with you—nobody gets me, you do.”

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SOS is not a feature-heavy album—if Rowe had her way, there would have been more guest artists, but she said following the album’s release that a lot of the performers she reached out to, and who had perhaps at one point agreed to turn in a verse for the project, simply never did. 

Of the guest artists that do appear on SOS, the name that was a real surprise, and thrill, to see, was Phoebe Bridgers, who appears in a haunting, tense verse on the equally as haunting, tense, and hypnotic “Ghost in The Machine.”

Even when the song’s second verse uses Artificial Intelligence as a flimsy metaphor and completely misses its landing (“Robot got future—I don’t/Robot get sleep, but I don’t power down”), “Ghost in The Machine is something to behold because it sounds like nothing else on SOS. Set against a kind of quiet, skittering, and slinking rhythm, there is a terrible underlying sense of dread, or tension that creeps through the whole thing, with no resolve, or release in sight. Tightly plucked and muted string instruments gently ripple through the slow-moving, hazy atmosphere that is crafted the moment it begins, and it barely rises above a certain level, keeping the sense of unease coursing through it from beginning to end.

The idea of loneliness and isolation are on the periphery of SOS—right down to the album’s stark and stunning cover art, and “Ghost in The Machine” does its best, as clunky as its lyricism can get, to grasp at the idea of human connection—even if it is at the expense of yourself at times. “Can you distract me from all the disaster?,” Rowe asks in the chorus. “Can you touch on me and not call me after? Can you hate on me, and mask it with laughter?”

The song itself is a highlight of the album, but it is Bridgers’ brief turn in “Ghost in The Machine”’s third verse that really makes it—fragmented and bleak, her lyrics do not exactly remove you from the narrative of the song, but they also seem just slightly removed from the world that Rowe has built. “You said all my friends are on my payroll,” Bridgers mumbles as the music breaks, and mournful piano chords can be heard. “You’re not wrong—you’re an asshole. Screaming at you in Ludlow, ‘I was yours for free.’”

“I don’t get existential—I just think about myself, and look where that got me,” she continues. “Standing on my own in an airport bar or hotel lobby. Waiting to feel clean—that’s so fucking boring.”

And there’s a telling moment that comes at the conclusion of “Ghost in The Machine” that, and perhaps it is unintentional, and forgive me if this is, in fact, a bit of a reach on my part as a listener, but in the final use of the chorus, where Rowe sings “I need humanity,” the last line of the chorus is cut short to just, “I need,” which I feel like is not exactly the key to understanding the more prominent themes or ideas that are spiraling around SOS, but it is something to note—that in Rowe, and in all of us, really, there is a need, and what many of us do not do is take the time to vocalize it.

And what I realized, both in the time I have spent sitting with SOS since its release, and after reading what information is available about Rowe and her often contentious interactions with her label, is that perhaps “reluctance” was not the right word to use when describing what I found compelling about Rowe as a figure within contemporary popular music.

But there is a reluctance—albeit one that she could not help, at least during the sessions for CTRL. The reluctance to give up control over the album and the direction it would take, but also the unfortunate reluctance to make decisions when paralyzed by anxiety—unable to decide when a song was really “done” or “good enough.”

The reluctance then leading to frustration—infamously saying that she was going to quit music completely nearly six months prior to the release of CTRL, because of the disinterest or reluctance on the part of her label to show support and prioritize her music. 

SOS is ultimately not a product of reluctance on Rowe’s part—but, again, a product of simply trying to get it right before it is released into the world. Throughout the album, she doesn’t shy away from her own lived experiences—often messy or complicated in how she depicts success, loneliness, love, lust, and anger, but ultimately just trying to find herself.

The line that sticks with me the most out of SOS in its entirety, or at least the one that I believe resonates the most, is from “Gone Girl,” where Rowe sings what we all might be thinking a lot of the time—trying to grow without hating the process. Because putting in “the work” is not easy—it can often seem impossible, and can make us, and others, uncomfortable, and “the work” never ends, which can be both humbling and overwhelming to think about. 

In the album’s opening track, Rowe fires off the line, “All that funny shit aside, I just want what’s mine,” and SOS, as sprawling as it is, and challenging as it can be at times, is her working to claim her place both as a person and a performer—fighting against the opposition she has faced, but also against her own anxieties and reluctance, all while trying to be kinder, or more compassionate, toward herself in the process.

The first thing that Solána Rowe asks for is more time—both from us, as listeners, but also from herself. 

SOS is out now as a digital download via RCA/Top Dawg.