Even though I have spent two days with SZA, I have not met her yet. She is in the hotel room the floor above mine. She is in the car ahead of ours. She is behind the only door backstage that is shut. Although she’s only ever metres from me, she feels worlds away, a sort of mythical being so clandestine she is only spoken of through cautious words and meaningful looks, cordoned off somewhere beyond the veil.
Over this warm June weekend, none of us have seen her in person, from what I understand – not her managers, not her crew, possibly not even her parents. (When we do meet, all of a sudden arm-to-arm in an upgraded Mercedes-Benz, her New York-based PR will start off by teasing that they “haven’t seen each other for a long time, even though I’ve been in London for about four or five days”.)
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So the first time I hear her voice is with 65,000 other people. In Hyde Park, for her sold-out headline BST show, the screens on stage start to glow. Bugs crawl across a fiery undergrowth on her big-screen backdrop, the animation descending lower below ground. In Tinker Bell-green fairy dust, cursive letters read “TDE presents”, then… “SZA”. Everyone screams. The 34-year-old floats out from under the stage on a teeny podium that rises up and up and up. Arms out, Christlike, she’s in full Dior Rasta – leotard, coat, boots, even a matching kneepad. Everyone has their phone out. People are waving. People are jumping. Everyone wants her attention. She holds theirs. She starts to sing.
Both bruised and assertive, the first track, “PSA”, is an unreleased song said to appear on one of the two feverishly anticipated projects she is said to be releasing this autumn: her third record, Lana, its date shrouded in uncertainty at the time of writing, and the long-awaited deluxe edition of her triple-platinum genre-bending sophomore album, SOS. Landing at the tail end of 2022, SOS debuted at No1 on the US Billboard 200 chart and stayed there for nine nonconsecutive weeks. SZA, born Solána Imani Rowe, became the first woman in almost seven years to achieve such a feat. Only two others can boast a similar recent record: Adele and Taylor Swift.
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The album continues to be the top-selling record by a Black woman this year. Its nine nods made her the most nominated artist at the 2024 Grammys (she won three) and she beat Swift, Miley Cyrus and Lana Del Rey to secure international artist of the year at the Brits, after performing four sold-out shows at The O2. SOS took her five years to release and she announced more than once that she would quit music as a result. Ctrl, her breakout studio debut (which recently made history as the longest-charting album by a woman ever, staying on the Billboard 200 for more than seven years, besting Swift’s 1989), was delayed for almost the same length of time, due to her whorling indecision over its tracks. While the strength and turbulence of her emotions almost cost her these runaway successes, they are also, in large part, responsible for them: her celestial sound traverses her insecurities, chronicling a naked thirst for a love that eludes her and all the mistreatment inflicted in its pursuit. With stark candour, she captures the mess of modern dating, striking a chord with a young generation of listeners, particularly women, making her a pioneer among a current wave of self-reflective, sensitive main pop girls. (SZA’s acting debut, in an upcoming comedy One of Them Days with Keke Palmer, out in January, is only set to cement that reputation.) Billie Eilish, ne plus ultra, tells me she has “been a fan of SZA since she put ‘Childs Play’ out. It was one of my biggest inspirations for so much of my music and I would reference it all the time,” she says of a decade-old track from SZA’s third EP, Z. “Watching her get the recognition that she deserved for so long has been so satisfying.”