SZA‘s Skeletons

The singer’s second album bares it all.

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IT HAS BEEN illuminating to watch SZA navigate interviews around the release of her sophomore album, SOS, like she’s not quite sure what to make of the project beyond being happy to have expunged the emotions it documents. She seems more interested in expressing that trying to create on a professional level while being buffeted by tragedy is a truly daunting task than in dishing about the lyrics, which must’ve been hard-won. “I’ve buried so many people in my life you would think that I would be used to it or just have a threshold,” the artist born Solána Imani Rowe told Rolling Stone in 2020. Now she’s rating her sanity at 6.7 on an album whose cover art mimics a paparazzi shot of Princess Diana perched on a diving board in the last week of her life, seeking tranquility but naggingly aware of always being watched. SOS is processing loss and fame and pain and desire at the center of millions of ogling eyes. Five years after the slow-burn success of her breakthrough debut, Ctrl, the Top Dawg Entertainment superstar has turned in a follow-up that matches its predecessor’s rawness while speaking to multiplying difficulties in romance and on the world’s stage, where praise for her art meets gossip about her body—and body count.