As Lizzo points out on the opening track of Special, she has “been home since 2020”. Judging by the lyrics of her fourth album, much of the intervening time has been spent coping with heartbreak, although a considerable amount clearly went into puzzling over how to follow Cuz I Love You, an album that drastically shifted Lizzo’s career. It turned the lauded leftfield hip-hop artist into an inescapable part of the mainstream pop landscape, spawning one TikTok-boosted hit after another. The twin challenges of coping with sudden success and deciding what to do next evidently hung heavy. There’s a lot of stuff on Special about healing – for Lizzo this involves “twerking and making smoothies” – while, by her account, she wrote 170 songs before whittling them down to these 12.
