After nearly 7 years SZA came out with another album ‘ SOS ’. This album has been on the billboard 100s for the past month since it’s been released. SZA has learned the art of inner monologue, transforming deeply particular compliances into bejeweled songs that feel close, relatable, and unobtainable, all at once. On her remarkable debut album, CTRL, she related these contradictions through warbled melodies that threw ultramodern R&B and pop song structure out the window, letting her voice weave in, over, and through the beats.

SOS., SZA’s long-awaited second album, is indeed more amusing than her 2017 debut, CTRL. The songs are relaxed and more confident and the good vibes — retaliation and a pride ego booster. The album gives the most intimate and juicy tone- exposures since the Real World confessionals. It’s the most assured SZA has ever sounded. According to Marissa G. Muller of Rolling Stone magazine, SZA’s vocals alternate between a “vapory husk and a sky-high falsetto”. Jordan Sargent of Pitchfork magazine labeled SZA’s vocals as being “chillwave” and “ethereal”. SZA’s music has unpredictable, motivational, and complex lyrics she puts behind songs that sound like spontaneous confessions. Her vocal cues show tricks and asymmetries that are simultaneously conversational and strategic.

The cover of SOS depicts SZA, a previous marine biology major, perched on a diving board surrounded by the deep blue ocean, her body pointed contemplatively at the sky. She was inspired by a 1997 photograph of Princess Diana on Mohamed Al Fayed’s yacht taken one week before her death and stated she wanted to add homage to the “isolation” in it. On SOS, she feels like a superwoman who deserves the world one minute and then a depressive second-stringer sacrificing her well-being for toxic men. She counteracts the millennial inner hot girl or boy / sad woman and men by filling in the emotional space.

With 23 songs, “SOS” reaches a lengthy, nuanced argument, SZA is owning her companions and herself. It’s not a storytelling album, but the songs are associated with recurring threads: a psychodrama of unfaithfulness, betrayals and connections, self-doubt, and self-affirmation. The songs leap from personalized trauma to common dilemmas, while SZA challenges herself as both musician and person. She introduces herself not as a heroine but as a work in progress who knows she’ll make more faults. “Now that I ruined everything I’m so free,” SZA exults in “Seek & Destroy,” even as the slow, minor-key track tries to drag her down. “SOS” attracts numerous producers and collaborators, by the rise of old styles and catching current ones. In “Kill Bill, ” SZA imagines ending the life of her ex and his new girlfriend, sounding both lighthearted and dangerous as the song spoofs a plush R&B ballad. In “F2F,” she starts with earnest folk-pop and blasts into a rock as she insists that she’s only cheating with someone “because I miss you.” In “Gone Girl,” she warns a partner about getting too clingy, “I need your touch, not your scrutiny,” she sings, “Squeezing too tight, boy you’re losing me”. Those are only a few of the amazing songs in this album. 

SZA’s talent is unreal. Her music just hits differently than a lot of other music you might listen to. So if you like R&B music and need someone new to listen to she just might be the right person for you.