On the approach to any arena, you can normally get a good sense of the headliner by looking at the people outside. Not so much SZA. The hordes that await the opening night of the American singer’s UK SOS tour are overwhelmingly female, but their subcultural uniform is an incongruous mix: cargo pants and cowboy boots, headscarves and high-contrast mesh, designer slogan T-shirts and grungy babydoll slips. It’s a glorious sight, showing that music really does bring people together.
Seemingly, this is exactly the way that SZA wants it. If Drake, the Weeknd and Kanye West defined the 2010s with their dark, sad-boy reinventions of gangsta rap, then SZA offered up a feminine side of the narrative, espousing her sass but still succumbing to hunger for social approval and ill-advised intimacy. The first female signee to Top Dawg Entertainment (Kendrick Lamar, ScHoolboy Q, Isaiah Rashad), her debut album Ctrl was a seismic breakthrough – nominated for four Grammys, its bad-bitch anthems still confessed to an insecurity that lay beneath. 2022’s follow-up SOS had the same lyrical brief but an even greater sonic palette, establishing SZA as someone who shares listeners’ ever-diversifying tastes, tapping into anything and everything that moves her.
Transforming through various nautical-themed sets, SZA’s show enacts this versatility. She is poised on the tip of a diving board for opener PSA (as she is on the cover of SOS, replicating a Princess Diana image); with a gasp, she falls and emerges on an LED-stacked shipwreck, moving through Seek & Destroy’s fluid choreography. No matter how loud her live band wails or how energetically her dancers flock, her voice always rises above, daring the audience to outdo her clambering ad-libs. She soon gets her wish on Love Galore: when collaborator Travis Scott pops out of the ship’s parapet, the screams amplify to fingers-in-your-ears-decibels, enthusiastic arms moving as if swatting off invisible birds.
Introducing an A-list guest star so early could be a reckless move, but in a 30-song set, SZA never wastes a minute. Ghost In the Machine and Blind are a smart shift of intellectual-indie pace, while the cheeky, tropical Kiss Me More reminds the crowd that she can also do straight chart pop.
For the opening of her third act, we’re transported inside a submarine control room that feeds live footage from backstage, cameras trained on her face as stagehands buzz around her next sartorial change. Before you can take in the Truman Show elegance of it, she’s already floating out on the Sufjan Stevens-style seas of Blind, head-banging her way through the pop-punk of F2F, and belting out fan-favourite Drew Barrymore cross-legged on the floor, trading lines with the teary crowd upfront (“I get so lonely I forget what I’m worth,” she confides; “We get so lonely we pretend that this works,” they echo back). Not long after, she ditches the main stage entirely in favour of an orange lifeboat that sails above the crowd, dispatching handfuls of confetti and sharing more beautifully heartfelt ballads about an ex-partner of 11 years who cruelly “blocked her on everything”.
It’s this elastic, seamless back-and-forth between intimate personability and big-production polish that makes SZA’s live show a marvel. For her closer, she slow-writhes through breakthrough single The Weekend, before ultimately ending on the dreamy Good Days, back on the diving board and bathed in sunset gold. It’s an understated finish, but one befitting an artist who trusts the message of their own catalogue, knowing that to end on straightforward R&B optimism does not undo the rich variety that has been showcased before. The ultimate message is clear: wherever R&B is headed next, you can rely on SZA to steer the ship.