SZA Is at Her Most Streamlined and Direct on ‘Lana’
SZA knows how to make an entrance. She had the world fiending so hard for her new Lana — first she announced the album drop for Friday at midnight, then kept everyone chewing our fingernails while she took an extra 15 hours to give it the right finishing touches. But it was worth it. Lana arrives just in time to tie a bow around the music year, just like her epochal blockbuster SOS did two Decembers ago. It’s officially part of the deluxe edition “reissue” of SOS, but it stands on its own, with 15 tracks in 46 minutes. These songs don’t feel like bonus tracks, or addenda to any previous statement — they’re a great album in themselves. Lana is SZA in moody late-night R&B electro-ballad mode, her sonic imagination and emotional ferocity as vivid as ever.
The only previously released tune is “Saturn,” from back in February. The production is spare: lots of deep-soul guitar, chillout synths, laid-back beats, plus a monster Kendrick Lamar feature. The songwriting reveals Solana Rowe at her most plainspoken and blunt. She spends these songs confessing her weaknesses, fighting to forgive people who won’t even notice the effort, yearning for emotional resolutions that she still can’t reach.
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Some tracks are SOS outtakes, some are new — the album was in flux right down to the wire. (And for double-digit hours after the wire.) Even the album title reflects an artist who’s in the middle of changing her identity. It’s a nickname she’s had since childhood — she got “Lana” as her first tattoo when she was 13, because the price was $10 a letter, and she only had $40. “Now I got to be called something else,” SZA told Rolling Stone, after revealing that SOS’s title came from her nickname “Sos.” “I’m now going by Lana, but that might be burnt, too.”
SZA makes Lana flow like a journal of emotional reawakening. She’s taking stock of where she is and who she is now, after the massive global success and acclaim of SOS. It opens with “No More Hiding,” over flute-like synths and acoustic guitar. “Cut myself open to see what I’m made of,” she sings. “I guess I’m guilty of giving fake love/I’m so fake, fuck.” It’s intense to hear her plead, “I want to be in love for real.”
She gets help from some of her trustiest producers, including ThankGod4Cody, Michael Uzowuru, Carter Lang, Rob Bisel, Benny Bianco, Tyler Johnson and more. The Lil Yachty co-production “Chill Baby” is another tune where she struggles to quit hiding, after wasting too much of her life building protective walls (“hard to find the urge to build that wall”), yet still wary of trusting anyone. “Tired of watching people die, literal or figurative,” SZA sings. “I just want someone to stay around.”
“What Do I Do” is a top-notch heartache ballad, with one of her narrative twists: her man accidentally butt-dials her in the middle of having sex with someone else. She’s furious yet vulnerable, raging, “Even though you with that bitch now/I get emotional, it’s hard to shut it off.” This could be a “Kill Bill” looking for a place to happen. She sings over chill smooth-jazz chords that echo Lil Kim’s Nineties classic “Crush on You” (originally sampled from the Jeff Lorber Fusion’s “Rain Dance”) — a clever juxtaposition of the Queen Bee’s top-of-the-world bravado with SZA’s wounded fragility.
“Scorsese Baby Daddy” is another standout, full of steamy Eighties-style cheese-rock guitar. “I rolled up all my problems,” SZA admits. “And then I smoked about it/I could have called my mom up/I’d rather fuck about it.” She might yearn for a solid connection, but she’s hooked on the kind of tension and turmoil seen in a gangster movie — she’s “addicted to the drama/Scorsese baby daddy.” The image is brilliant, since the Martin Scorsese filmography is loaded with unstable men who are decidedly not soulmate material. (Even if it’s hot when Ray Liotta gives Lorraine Bracco that gun to hide in Goodfellas.) But it’s a song where love gets twisted up in bad moods and downward spirals.
The most anomalously light-hearted tune is “BMF,” her bossa nova moment. She sings the hook from the Stan Getz/Astrud Gilberto classic “The Girl from Ipanema,” except the action moves from the beaches of Brazil to Motown. She sings, “The boy from South Detroit keeps bossing/And I can’t keep my panties from dropping.” But she also gives a shout out to Slauson Avenue — a touching salute to one of her heroes, the late Detroit icon Nipsey Hussle.
She sings about dancing in the “Kitchen,” except while on shrooms, her voice processed into a sleek pureé, over a loop of lush Seventies guitar from the Isley Brothers. But she’s forgiving an ex for treating her cruelly — a major theme all through Lana. “Drive” finds her alone on the road, “headed to nowhere, hoping that somebody’s missing me somewhere.” SZA comes on full of aggressive, snarling, “I can’t succumb like these cum-guzzlers at all.”
Kendrick joins her on “30 for 30,” continuing their long winning streak. They always meld together, from “Doves in the Wind” on CTRL to “Luther” and “Gloria” on his new GNX. He tells her, “You fucking with n****s that’s thinking they cuter than you/Say you on your cycle, but he on his period too.” No clue who he’s talking about, of course, but the title may or may not remind you of her ex Drake, who ended his 2015 Future collabo What a Time to Be Alive with “30 for 30 Freestyle.” (It contains the ill-advised line, “So much legal action I’m like Michael Jackson.”)
“30 for 30” opens with a clever spoken-word sample from the Seventies Motown soul band Switch, via Rich Boy’s “Throw Some D’s.” We hear a voice confess to “immature things,” painful doubts and insecurities, the kind that SZA keeps trying to beat down all over Lana. She’s fighting to make changes, and to break old patterns that hold her back. This is terrain that she’s has been exploring since the beginning, yet she has never sounded so candid, so streamlined and direct. “I’m OK with not being a nice girl,” she told Rolling Stone in 2023. “I’m OK with people knowing that I’m competitive.” But Lana proves that SZA really has no competition at all.
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