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.
That willingness to showcase emotional mess carries over from SOS proper, but Lana is an altogether more subtle album: Its crush songs don’t carry as many caveats, and there are few outright vindictive or depressive moments in the vein of “I Hate U” or “Ghost in the Machine.” The sprawled-out R&B track “Diamond Boy (DTM),” luxuriates in the warmth of new affection; the arrangement is spacious but sophisticated, ending with a fleet, filtered rap verse that sounds totally disconnected from the song’s noodling guitar and enveloping blasts of sub-bass. It’s a sweet, canny outro—a musical manifestation of quieting racing thoughts to better enjoy the moment. The soaring “Another Life” is a breakup song, but it’s just as generous, poignant without any reservation: “I don’t care who you marry/Mine, mine, mine, mine, mine, mine, mine/Maybe in another life.” In the two years since SOS, SZA’s outlook has shifted, becoming more graceful and optimistic without losing its sense of tension; now, she just seems more interested in finding inner peace than capturing the attention of any one fuckboy. As she sings on “No More Hiding,” an album opener that combines delicate, bossa-nova-ish guitar and a yearning synth line and ends up sounding like it sprung from the same patch of alien wilderness she stands in on the album cover: “I wanna feel sun on my skin/Even if it burns or blinds me/I wanna be purified within.”
That softer outlook is reflected in the feel of Lana, which bridges the gap between CTRL’s lush, ambling indie R&B and the aggressively hook-forward nature of SOS. Although Lana sounds undeniably like a major label pop album, its component parts can only be described as NTS Breakfast Show-core: The synth line that runs throughout “Saturn”—which recalls Mort Garson’s “Plantasia”—turns it into something wondrous and exploratory, mirroring the shivery, extraterrestrial qualities of SZA’s voice, while an errant interpolation of “The Girl From Ipanema” adds a wrinkle to the smiley TikTok pop of “BMF.” “Kitchen,” which makes a strong challenge for the title of SZA’s most luminescent song, turns the Isley Brothers’ “Voyage to Atlantis” into what feels like an Alvvays ballad, its unfussy arrangement and hazy ambiance glowing with the luster of a full moon. SZA’s voice is better suited to this kind of earthiness, which only appeared in flashes on SOS, as are her hooks, which are always indelible but rarely lean; the chorus of “Kitchen,” which flutters along like a piece of pollen on the wind, feels of a piece with music that’s more freeform and ingenious.
Throughout Lana, SZA sounds totally sure in her ability to command a stadium-sized audience with music that’s ambling and sometimes insular. “Drive,” a highlight toward the album’s end, is a rare moment of metatext. Over plaintive guitar, SZA unleashes a series of stream-of-consciousness verses about all the anxiety that roils underneath Lana, feelings of grandeur and self-doubt and contempt: “I keep pretending everyone’s as good as me/Shit’s so weird I cannot speak/Balled so hard, I think I peaked.” At the chorus, she stops abruptly and begins to sing: “Just drivin’/Just tryna get my head right/It’ll all be better when I/Just gotta get my head right.” SZA’s music can feel claustrophobic at times simply because of how deeply it is rooted in her own thoughts. “Drive,” on the other hand, feels infinite—the sound of total freedom.
Correction: A previous version of this review incorrectly stated that the song “Saturn” contained a sample from Mort Garson’s “Plantasia.” It has been adjusted to reflect the author’s opinion of what it sounds like.
