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 and the conflicts that caused between her and the folks at Top Dawg Entertainment, but when it finally landed in December of 2022 five years along from its predecessor the general consensus 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 magazine 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 -- the first time a female artist had enjoyed such a long run at No. 1 since Adele's 25 in 2015. Once again, stickin' to her guns had paid off for SZA. off for SZA.

TRACKLISTING:

1. SOS
2. Kill Bill
3. Seek & Destroy
4. Low
5. Love Language
6. Blind
7. Used
8. Snooze
9. Notice Me
10. Gone Girl
11. Smoking on my Ex Pack
12. Ghost in the Machine
13. Nobody Gets Me
14. Conceited
15. Special
16. Too Late
17. Far
18. Shirt
19. Open Arms
20. I Hate U
21. Good Days
22. Forgiveless