SOS! Reeling into SZA’s New Album

On Dec 9, 2022, SZA released her new album, SOS, consisting of 23 songs. SOS has become a hit, especially on TikTok with her song, Kill Bill, appearing in many videos and trends.

SZA is a singer, whose music has been described as Alternative R&B, with elements of hip-hop, soul, indie rock, cloud rap, witch house, and chillwave. She first debuted in 2017, with the album Ctrl.

SOS has the song titles, SOS, Kill Bill, Seek & Destroy, Low, Love Language, Blind, Used, Snooze, Notice Me, Gone Girl, Smoking on my Ex Pack, Ghost in the Machine, F2F, Nobody Gets Me, Conceited, Special, Too Late, Far, Shirt, Open Arms, I Hate U, Good Days, and Forgiveless. 

The opening song of the album, SOS, opens with a distressed call that can be heard throughout the beginning and middle of the song. Although this song isn’t one of my favorites, it’s a pretty good song to start off the album since it’s short.

The next song after SOS is Kill Bill. The title of this song is heavily based on the film, Kill Bill. This one is one of her most popular songs out of the entire album, having 249,695,426 plays on Spotify. This is one of my personal favorites because of the lyrics, as well as the beats and tones in the background music. 

It has lyrics that mention SZA killing her ex, and then after, his girlfriend is next. For example, the chorus, “I just killed my ex, not the best idea. Killed his girlfriend next, how’d I get here? I just killed my ex, I still love him, though. Rather be in hell than alone”.

SZA recently released a music video for Kill Bill on January 10th. As stated before, it’s heavily based on the 2003 film, Kill Bill. The video starts off with SZA listening to Nobody Gets Me on the radio. Her boyfriend leaves her a letter and then shoots up her trailer, along with a few of his companions. Later on, she gains revenge on her ex, sweeping through his guards, and kills him at the end. At the end of the video, a snippet of Seek & Destroy gets featured. I loved the production of this video and enjoyed the fact they included animated bits during some of the fight scenes.

I talk about Kill Bill a lot more than the rest of the songs for the reason that it’s her most popular song. It has also risen and remained the No. 1 song for a while. 

The final song of the album is Forgiveless. This song starts off with snippets from The Stomp, by the artist, Ol’ Dirty Bastard, who passed away in 2004, and is still tributed to many artists since. This song has a pretty calm beat, giving off the vibe of an older rap song. 

Overall, I enjoyed this album. The tone of each song and the lyrics were stunning and listeners of similar artists would enjoy this album for this reason. SZA included a fantastic variety of songs, and I think it’s reasonable to have 23 songs in this album. My favorites besides Kill Bill are Seek & Destroy, Ghost in the Machine, Low, Far, Shirt, and Open Arms. I rate it a 9.5/10. I recommend this album to anyone who would like to listen to more of SZA’s music.  

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