The first—though not the last—vision of SZA I witnessed last summer loomed over Lake Shore Drive and was measured in bright, pixilated yards. It was August in Chicago, the air was thick, and Lollapalooza was in full swing. If homie steering our surge-priced SUV hadn’t rolled down the windows to catch the breeze off Lake Michigan, I might have thought I’d hallucinated the shapeshifting songstress on the stageside jumbotron. She was there and then she wasn’t: blink and traffic had already darted a quarter mile down the highway, past the festivities. As with most things related to her image and its evolution, there was also a larger dissonance at hand. Solána’s both the kind of artist you’d have never imagined headlining an event like this 10 years ago and also the exact artist you’d picture doing so now.
She’s everywhere. On Skims billboards in midtown Manhattan. In Cineplexes from Seattle to San Diego, Savannah to St. Paul. All over the Hot 100 charts; 12 weeks on top as a lead artist. And on Sunday she’ll join her GNX-cruising cousin Kendrick Lamar at the Super Bowl halftime show, the biggest entertainment stage this mixed-up kleptocratic wilderness of ours has to offer. SZA’s rise, from underground princess to R&B ruler and pop darling, is astounding in many ways—but most astounding is the apparent ease with which she tends, all at once, to myriad sounds and visions of herself. With equal handfuls of spunk, savvy, and sincerity, she’s managed the miracle work of captivating ears the world over precisely because she’s repeatedly refused constructs: of genre and subject, structure and artistic permeability.
In her professional adolescence she prized a certain vibe, hypnotic chords, and maximalist compositions. Her parents spun mostly jazz records around the house growing up—greats with long, blue shadows like Billie Holiday, Sarah Vaughan, John Coltrane, and Miles Davis—while pushing her to sharpen her burgeoning talents on stage. (Hailing from the Newark suburb of Maplewood, SZA attended the same high school as another musical multi-hyphenate, the rapper and singer Lauryn Hill.) Her early work was devoted as much to experimentations across trill wave, dreampop, neosoul, and trap as it was to ironing out her pen. Between briefly attending marine biology classes at Delaware State University, bartending at tristate-area strip clubs, and working at the streetwear outfit 10.Deep, she released two EPs, eventually connecting with her future TDE manager Punch Henderson by introducing herself before a show in Manhattan. In the summer of 2013, she signed with TDE and eight months later released her third EP, Z. All up and down the dreamy funhouse of a tape, her eye for melancholy detail jumped off the page.
By early 2016, she’d picked up writing credits on Nicki Minaj’s “Feeling Myself” and a guest appearance on “Consideration” off Rihanna’s Anti, where the younger vocalist displayed something closer to her showstealing croon and lyrical wit (“When I look outside my window / I can’t get no peace of mind”). Ctrl, her full-length debut—-replete with Forrest Gump references, electro-aspirations, and 20-something angst—dropped in June 2017 and changed the trajectory of her career. In part because of the album’s intentionality in audience and subject, she became a folk hero of post-internet R&B, even while maintaining ambitions beyond the framework of genres.
In a promotional era defined by hypervisibility, SZA spent the latter half of the 2010s and the early 2020s mostly off the grid, wading through marshlands and waterfalls on her Instagram in between occasional hitmaking guest appearances (think Doja Cat’s ubiquitous 2021 bubblegum ditty “Kiss Me More”) and solo drops (like the lush Wayne-hued primal coo of her first top 10 hit, “Good Days”). By the time she commenced her full reemergence on the public stage—clad in a XL Harley Davidson tee and bootcuts to rival aughts NBA draftees—in a late 2022 SNL guest appearance, the internet and her fan base were practically frothing at the mouth for new material.
Her sophomore album, SOS, was released less than a week later, and the momentum was palpable. A sprawling collage of a record with tracks ranging from emo-punk (“F2F”), slippery trap (“Low”), ride-or-die slowjams (“Snooze”), and acoustic heartbreakers (“Nobody Gets Me”), the 68-minute follow-up to Ctrl stayed at no. 1 on the Billboard charts for seven straight weeks, won three Grammys, and launched SZA’s first arena tour. Led by her viral Tarantino-influenced revenge ballad, “Kill Bill,” it was one of those album releases where anyone within earshot understood, almost immediately, its maker had reached a new strata of fame.
There is a part of her rise—her deft wielding of post-millennial romantic shorthand, her fearless tendency toward self-assessment, her susceptibility to her most intrusive thoughts—that is distinctly modern; of this particular moment, in this particular culture. But there is another part of her arc, particularly her devotion to peeling herself open on wax, which links in a long chain of crooners, spanning genders, genres, and epochs: from Usher lilting out his “insecurities” to Sade purring about her “bullet to spare,” from Marvin’s admitted impatience all through the ’70s to peak-Aretha’s exasperation. If love is SZA’s chosen battlefield, she is wounded as often as she is inflicting pain.
Professionally, she has completely outpaced even her own projections, if not qualitatively then at the very least quantitatively. She’s the biggest draw in a genre she’s understandably never fully embraced as defining her. Particularly in the wake of her once-label-mate Lamar forming his own artistic hub at pgLang, SZA—the same hopeful who had to send folks her music to peep them to her potential—is TDE’s apex artist. She’s graduated from hole-in-the-wall performances to arenas, and now, to stadium tours. At the same time that she’s pulling in tens of millions at the box office and trophies at the Grammys, she’s speeding up her own release schedule, and is about to make waves as, certifiably, the only performer in Super Bowl history to have once referred to “that dick” as “barely third place.”
Lana, her newest project, is as pared-down as any of her previous works, a minimalist safari populated by the all-to-familiar figures, fears, and frustrations native to the inner recesses of her mind. Subjects range from accidental voicemails left by adulterous lovers, to dramatist baby daddies, to a Murphy’s law of toxic entanglements, and a Stevie-inspired plea for cooler heads to prevail in this world or the next. It’d be an upset if we don’t spot at least one bout of tit-for-tat syllabic pyrotechnics between her and K.Dot on Sunday evening, either in the form of their recent “30 for 30” duet from her album, or “Luther” from his. Whether she does so as a rapper, a singer, an acoustic poet, or an R&B queen, elides the point and the coup. The Super Bowl is SZA’s highest-profile confirmation yet of her own ability to be everything: global hitmaker, on-screen heartbreaker, suburban sadgirl, or transcendental hermit. In the study of Solána, there’s always another layer to the picture.
