What I listed with: Wireless Bluetooth Headphones
Editor Rating: 9.5/10
The Bottom Line: Although, SZA hasn't released an "album" before. True SZA and TDE fans aren't surprised in fact they are saying "I told you so"
Everyone make room and get the hell out of the way, because SZA is here. The singer and songwriter Solána Rowe gifts us with something we have heard in years; a new album called “Ctrl.”
SZA’s chosen realm was a hazy place of echoes and hollows, of unreal tones and disembodied voices (her own), of obliquely sketched feelings and situations. She was clearly listening well beyond the borders of hip-hop and R&B; she has cited Björk, Billie Holiday, Miles Davis and Animal Collective among her influences, and her producers have included Toro y Moi (the chillwave songwriter Chaz Bundick) and Emile Haynie, who has worked with Lana del Rey and Bruno Mars. Her music quickly got noticed; among SZA’s many collaborations in hip-hop, dance music and pop, Rihanna’s 2016 album “Anti-” — her swerve toward the R&B avant-garde — enlisted SZA to help write and sing “Consideration,” its opening track.
“Ctrl,” SZA’s first album for a major label, holds on to the electronics and the leisurely tempos of her past work. But now she fully commands the foreground of her songs. Her voice is upfront, recorded to sound natural and unaffected, with all its grain and conversational quirks. And the album begins and ends with songs that back her with a guitar and little else, a signal of unadorned openness.
And in the lyrics, SZA, 26, makes clear what’s on her mind: desire in all its complications, often intersecting with the continuing effort to find her own identity. Her songs often place her in states of ambivalence: in hot-and-cold romances that leave her unsure even about her own feelings, in situations where her insecurities grapple with her self-respect. Her melodies hop around, perpetually off-balance; the production, most of it by Scum (Tyran Davidson), uses the shallow tones of trap percussion and keeps its pulse almost subliminal, leaving SZA’s ups and downs to create the motion in the songs.
In “Love Galore,” a duet with Travis Scott, the singer is reunited with a guy she once pushed away and still doesn’t exactly know what to do with — “Why you bothering me when you know you don’t want me?,” she pouts — despite a chorus that lilts, “Long as we got love” — but do they? Even the harmony, largely implied by a keyboard part hinting at Radiohead, never resolves.
“Broken Clocks” enfolds SZA amid blurry keyboard tones and a watery sample of men’s voices as she ponders memories of an old romance that still haunts her, while “Drew Barrymore” confesses “I get so lonely I forget what I’m worth.” But then there’s “Doves in the Wind,” a praise song about female carnality including an enthusiastic concurrence from the rapper Kendrick Lamar, and “The Weekend,” where quiet-storm chords confirm an amorous time-share: He’s got a girl, but the singer gets him on weekends.
“I wish I was a normal girl,” SZA sings in “Normal Girl,” as she wonders how to keep the guy she wants, but she continues, “I’ll never be.” The album concludes with “20 Something,” with SZA, a guitar and her overdubbed backup vocals pondering all the uncertainties of her current status while savoring them as well: “God bless the 20 somethings,” she sings. And in “Pretty Little Bird,” a love song with a guest rap from Isaiah Rashad, she notes, “You’ve hit the window a few times,” but also notes, “You still ain’t scared of no heights/When the spiral down feels as good as the flight.”
“Ctrl” is framed by spoken-word interludes from SZA’s mother, who talks about trying to maintain as much of a sense of control as she can, even if it’s an illusion. SZA’s songs accept how much she can’t control. But she can capture all their contradictions in her own sonic limbo
