SZA is TDE's newest artist, the first woman and R&B singer to sign to the label. Her debut album Z plays out like a fractured memory you struggle to piece together fully: there are shards of clarity, but only that.
When thinking back on the early careers of Kendrick Lamar, Schoolboy Q, and Ab-Soul—the household names on the label Top Dawg Entertainment—one element that sticks out is how easy it was to understand each rapper's point of view: Kendrick as the slick-talking, perceptive narrator with a fixation on the Reagan era of the 1980s, Schoolboy as the cocky street-hustler who turns gangsta rap on its head, Ab-Soul as the paranoid hippie. With recent signee Isaiah Rashad, the label has kept it up, presenting an assured artist in the lineage of the South's great thinking-man's MCs.
But the ability, or perhaps desire, to be understood immediately eludes TDE's newest artist SZA, the first woman and R&B singer to sign to the label. Her debut album Z plays out like a fractured memory you struggle to piece together fully: there are shards of clarity, but only that. Of course, not every album needs to be completely digestible, but Z is not the sort of mysteriously seductive record that reveals itself over time. Instead, it has walls that are tough, if not impossible, to punch through, making for an unnecessarily frustrating listen that too often feels guarded.
It is clear that SZA knows precisely what she wants her music to sound like: Z is essentially a chillwave album, every song resting softly on a bed of gauzy keyboard tones as muffled guitar figures and teetering drum patterns float by like dust in the sunlight. The results sound less weird than that description implies, since plenty of current R&B music folds back towards the same slumbering fog that defined chillwave. But very little chillwave featured female vocals—unless you include Beach House (previously sampled by Lamar, natch), spiritual ancestors of SZA whose DNA also courses through Z. A female R&B singer's version of a chillwave album could be both novel and contemporary if executed well, but Z is deeply flawed.
Z's biggest problem is that, despite choosing a sound that is soft and somnolent, SZA is too often overpowered by the music. The album is a glimmering swirl, but her voice gets lost. In a literal sense, it can be hard to hear her: on tracks like "Warm Winds", "Shattered Ring", and "Omega", her vocals are as ethereal as the beat, as entire songs dissipate into a mist. It's also impossible to get a sense for who she is. What is SZA going through? What has she been through? Unfortunately, Z does not reveal the answers to these questions, cutting against both the nature of her label and R&B as a genre.
The album opens up when SZA does, but that happens only in slices: the offhand aside of "Your skin tastes like brussels sprouts, I swear" on "Ur", the muttered plea of "Do you want to know me?" on the soulful "Child's Play", or the bracing humor of "Bumping that Jadakiss is dangerous for your sanity" on "Shattered Ring." "HiiiJack," produced by Toro y Moi, is the only time the album blossoms into a real, affecting chorus: "Sometimes I keep you in my mind/ Sometimes I let you go up high/ I'm using everything I find/ Do anything to keep you tied up." Here, SZA comes from an identifiable, relatable place, making a strong—and maybe even irrational—statement of devotion. With a beat that is both off-kilter and soothing and a chorus that floats away slowly like an ascendant balloon, it's a song so good that more like it could have pried Z all the way open. But that power rests solely with SZA, and hopefully she'll harness it on whatever comes next.