Must We Demand This Much Music From Artists?
To be a fan of SZA is to wait. After a quick trio of EPs in the early 2010s, the singer-songwriter adopted the steady pace of peers like her former TDE labelmate Kendrick Lamar. Her 2017 debut Ctrl was the fruit of three years of refinement. It took another five to receive a follow-up with SOS, a hefty, diffuse work whose sprawl seemed to make up for lost time. Unfortunately, it wasn’t long before the constituency’s appetite flared up again. SOS Deluxe: LANA was forged in the twin fires of thirst for fleshed-out versions of tantalizing snippets SZA herself released and the ambition of leakers taking it upon themselves to fill in the blanks. “When people leak my songs, they ruin them,” she vented to Variety in 2023. “You’ve sent me into a weird space creatively when you could have just waited for me, but you’re selfish.” LANA evolved over 2024, capitulating to not just mass cravings for more victuals from SOS’s overflowing pot but the artist’s desire to craft something that felt like it belonged to her. Fifteen songs arrived ahead of Christmas alongside tales of an exhausted engineer, with more music and an adjusted mix promised this month (the night before the refresh date, TDE president Terrence “Punch” Henderson said sample clearances were still being resolved).
LANA is a work of flux on overlapping fronts. Like Ye’s 2016 album The Life of Pablo, its form continues to solidify even after release; like SOS, its core theme is addressing an imbalance between the outward celebrity and shot-caller and the long-suffering lover and sometimes self-conscious overthinker behind the scenes. The writer behind “Nobody Gets Me” and “Conceited” is a resilient spirit buffeted by both shivering self-doubt and magnetic confidence. Half-postscript and half fresh thought, LANA speaks mellifluously to breakthroughs in a quest to reconcile dueling qualities, still clearing the particulate residue of the meteoric impact of Ctrl.
Prior to the mass notoriety heralded by “The Weekend,” SZA grew up a self-professed “weird” alt-rock kid in New Jersey. You sometimes sense that she views the world through the lens of having been counted out before, that the devil on her shoulder isn’t urging evil acts (“Kill Bill” notwithstanding) but suggesting that she doesn’t deserve to be an avenging potential voice of a generation blurting out the uncomfortable thoughts listeners bottle up. That makes LANA’s best songs feel exhaled rather than written down, like you’ve stumbled into a bathroom where a hard cry and pep talk were taking place and learned entirely too much about a stranger’s innermost fears. Lead single “Saturn” is a Dr. Manhattan meltdown: “I’ll be better on Saturn / None of this matters.” After taunting haters in the first verse, “Drive” resolves to entertain less strife: “And I can’t lose my focus, I know if hope is the goal then I can’t succumb like these cum-guzzlers at all.” But LANA is still a Heaux Tales, Mo’ Tales situation: Like the 2022 Jazmine Sullivan deluxe edition, this second serving delivers some diaristic scorchers while reinforcing a respect for the boundaries and potency of the original studio album.
LANA is one of the most reverb- and echo-centric mainstream releases in a year where the Fontaines D.C. and Justin Timberlake records arrived absolutely drenched in the stuff. Lyrics capturing SZA coming to prickly, impactful realizations about her naysayers and significant others are delivered via heady compositions whose auditory excess mirrors the overwhelming stories told overhead. Her vocals drift and disappear into the ether as her thoughts do, but the highs are piercing and often at war with aggressive bass levels. The voice overpowers the gorgeous “Scorsese Baby Daddy,” a play for the shouty, washed-out abandon of 2010s indie rock — or, to hear a miffed swath of Melanie Martinez fans tell it, the confrontationally noisy pop of 2023’s PORTALS — that accidentally overdelivers. Sometimes this dynamic tension is daring and delicious: Percussive phrasings punctuate the low post-Dilla boom-bap of “Chill Baby” like thunder and lightning, and “Kitchen” coats a bit of the Isley Brothers’ “Voyage to Atlantis” in a light haze of tinny skronk and apparent sample-rate reduction, donning the aesthetic imperfections of a literally unearthed demo. Elsewhere, the approach disorients: Bass takes up most of the oxygen in the bluesy “Crybaby,” exerting a loudness you can feel in your feet while a pleading SZA vocal competes: “Maybe you should stop focusing all of that negative blocking the positive.”
While LANA’s mix cuts a weedier path through the spectrum of hertz than SOS, its style doesn’t wander as much. Trap jams like “Low,” with Travis Scott, are in shorter order, as are the previous album’s exciting rap and pop-punk excursions. LANA favors old soul, ’90s R&B, campfire folk, and delightful combinations of each, paying sonic homage to bygone love songs in “Crybaby,” “Diamond Boy (DTM),” and “Love Me 4 Me.” These influences steer the plot in “Drive,” a breathtaking acoustic cut about consulting the music of your predecessors. “30 for 30,” with Kendrick, samples the yearning “I Call Your Name,” by the Ohio group Switch, also invoking the pomp of Rich Boy’s “Throw Some D’s,” the 1979 single’s most memorable flip. Like Lamar’s recent GNX, LANA is a retrenchment into a firmer sense of genre conceptualized on a tighter timeline than the two major-album statements prior, you’d think because the audience will wait five years for heat. But you run the risk of the acrimonious response of Frank Ocean and Rihanna’s long-awaited follow-ups and the vault raids artists like Playboi Carti experience.
LANA is a slighter though no less haunted album than the full-length it’s stacked on top of now, like a DLC pack of more stories from the same journey to self-love captured in SOS. It’s not necessarily the more self-assured work; in the end, we’re dreaming of a quieter life, either via the death and rebirth “Another Life” implies — “Self-respect? (I’d rather die!)” — or the interplanetary decampment of “Saturn.” In its speedier launch, narrower focus, and aural maximalism, LANA finds SZA keeping pace with sticking up for herself like she did when she was smoking on her ex’s pack two years ago. The batting average is waning, though. The epilogue to the aqueous SOS runs a little soupy. Must we demand this much music from artists?
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