Available on: Top Dawg Entertainment
“I love being called an R&B singer,” Solana “SZA” Rowe tweeted last year, “except not at fucking all.” Tagging her Soundcloud offerings as “alternative,” “glitter trap,” and most bluntly, “not R&B,” the singer clearly chafes at being pigeonholed, telling an interviewer that “it’s easier to label me R&B because I’m a woman of color.”
But while fighting against the expectations of twentysomething women of color who make music is admirable, her 10-song Z is not nearly as alternative as it aims to be. While it draws from pop, hip-hop, electronic music and — yes — R&B, Z mostly traffics in the kind of hypnagogic, woozy songcraft that defined her first EPs — a sound that has not been in short supply: when even Beyoncé is doing it, does it cease to be alternative?
Genre designations aside, SZA is certainly talented, especially as a lyricist. She spins tales of young love, youthful ennui and spiritual journeys with imagery so evocative that even usually-passive listeners will be searching for lyric sheets. Throughout Z, she toys with rhetorical devices — abstract synesthesia (“your skin tastes like brussel sprouts”), corporeal violence (“Sometimes, I crack my veins so bad / Just to see if it’s blue”), and plenty of playful nostalgia (“Ripping the heads off all my Barbie dolls,” “We were all thirteen once / Long live tramp stamps and Pepper Ann”) — with a poet’s dexterity.
Musically, SZA and her collaborators deserve credit for trying different approaches. Toro y Moi and Mac Miller craft opaque tracks whose synths gurgle and splatter, frequent collaborator Felix Snow is behind the EP’s most clear-cut pop track (the twinkling synth-popper ‘Julia’), and DJ Dahi handles the puzzlebox beat on ‘Babylon’. In-demand producer Emile Haynie helmed three tracks, and the spaghetti Western guitar lick on the reverb-heavy ‘Shattered Ring’ is reminiscent of Haynie’s best known collaborator: Lana Del Rey.
Yet no matter the producer, SZA is comfortable and harmonious; on ‘Green Mile’, she echoes the uneasiness and bag-of-bones percussion of the production with a tale of shotgun blasts and massacred bodies. And not even high profile guests steal the spotlight. The singer is joined on a pair of tracks by Chance the Rapper and Kendrick Lamar (who’s in better form than on most of his guest spots), and their appearances feel organic, without the rapper-on-an-R&B-track incongruence that often marks this type of collaboration.
Z is billed as an EP, but that undersells the completion and cohesion of these 10 songs. Her voice may be gentle, the songs just left-of-center, but SZA’s lyrics demand attention. And even if it’s not coloring outside the lines as much as it thinks it is, Z is an impressive effort from someone who was snatching beats less than two years ago.
