Five years after her critically acclaimed debut album, CTRL, in 2017, S.Z.A. will release her much-awaited sophomore album.
S.Z.A.’s second studio album S.O.S., released on Friday (Dec. 9) via Top Dawg Entertainment/R.C.A. Records, marks the conclusion of her five-year hiatus.
S.O.S. is the follow-up to CTRL, her renowned debut album, which debut at No. 3 on the Billboard 200 and remained there for 286 weeks straight (through the Dec. 10 edition).
She talked openly about the challenge of starting another intensely demanding album cycle in her November Billboard cover story.
“I could genuinely start crying at any minute and try to jump through this wall. She declared at the time, “I’m practically falling apart. But it’s not like the pressure from the album; life is f-king hard. It is absurd to expect someone to perform at a high level while life is still in progress. The intended recipient of this is a machine, not a person.
There are 23 tracks total, including Phoebe Bridgers’ “Ghost in the Machine,” Travis Scott’s “Open Arms,” Don Toliver’s “Used,” and Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s “Forgiveless.”
S.O.S. was her “most audacious body of work yet,” according to Billboard, who had an early listen to several of the album’s tracks for the cover story. S.O.S. has the most engaging instrumentation of any song she has ever written, with her favorite lo-fi beats coexisting with surf rock in the same track, a grunge record, and an acoustic guitar-driven ballad surviving side by side without feeling out of place. Moreover, S.Z.A. claims that during her Ctrl sessions, she was a “more careless writer,” but she has improved her writing. A five-year wait was justified for the album S.O.S.
