SZA: SOS (2LP) [TOP DAWG/RCA]

Why you'll love it

SOS spent 10 weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard 200, the longest run by a woman since Adele's 25, and won the Grammy for Best Progressive R&B Album. "Kill Bill," "Snooze" and "Good Days" are all here, across a sprawling 23 tracks.

This edition

• 2LP set, 23 tracks over four sides
• Top Dawg Entertainment / RCA pressing (cat# 19658779211)

About the album

SZA had such a hard time letting go of her 2017 debut, Ctrl, that at one point her record label reportedly confiscated a hard drive she'd filled with a couple-hundred unfinished songs. SOS's creation was a similarly hard-fought battle, not least due to the impossibly high standards SZA set for herself, but when it finally landed in December of 2022, five years along from its predecessor, the general consensus was that all the effort she put into getting her second album just right had been far from a waste of time.

SOS expanded SZA's sonic palette well beyond straight-up R&B and hip-hop as a response to what she saw as the music industry's narrow definition of what "Black music" should be. "We started rock-'n'-roll," she commented to Complex at the time. "Why can't we just be expansive and not reductive?" The moody SOS thus takes some of its cues from modern indie rock and electronic music, even from folk, alongside the gleaming future-R&B of Ctrl, making for a heady and uncompromising 70-minute listen that nevertheless debuted atop the Billboard album chart in the U.S. and stayed there for 10 weeks. Once again, stickin' to her guns had paid off for SZA.

Also at Kops: more SZA on vinyl · browse Hip Hop / R&B

Tracklist

Listen

On Top Dawg Entertainment / RCA (cat# 19658779211), first out in 2022.