SZA is a different breed of pop star. In even her most glammed-up press shot, she is splattered with blood; in another, she’s coated in a thick film of mud, and on the cover of her second album, the emotional bombshell that is SOS, she sits with her back facing the camera, looking out on a vast ocean, in a nod to a famed paparazzi shot of Princess Diana. These are distancing devices – ways for the 33-year-old musician to armour herself against the leery intensity of fame.
It makes sense that she would have an inclination towards self-protection: SOS contains some of the most intense, emotionally scabrous music to grace the UK or US charts in a long time. Case in point: Kill Bill, the album’s calling-card, is hardly your typical pop radio fare. It’s an unapologetic, avowedly sober murder ballad, in which SZA sings over a diffuse boom-bap beat about killing her ex-boyfriend so that no other woman can ever have him. The production is plush, comically light, gilded with soft doo-wop harmonies, but the lyrics are brazen, galvanised and monomaniacal. Although named for the Quentin Tarantino film, Kill Bill’s revenge fantasy provides no real emotional payoff; its narrative is a cry of pure fatalism, with no return for its narrator other than a split-second of bloodlust. I heard SOS at a listening session a week before its release, and when Kill Bill concluded – with SZA’s emphatic “Rather be in hell than alone” – you could hear much of those in attendance let out an audible “oof”.
