[rayword45]

Day 998: SOS by SZA

It's that time of year again! The time of year where I binge a bunch of albums and dump reviews en masse in hopes of finding new replacements for my upcoming end of year list!

Except don't expect that this time around. I know what you're thinking, which is that I'm being a lazy fuck, but truthfully that's only 60% of the reasoning for not doing reviews this time around. I am still listening to a bunch of new albums daily and will still make a list on RateYourMusic of my 2022 faves, but I'm only going to write this review and one more for the remainder of the year, why? Because I want 1000 to be somewhat special in some way, I haven't thought of how yet, but I'll find some way to make it special for y'all 3 people who still open this thread. Expect the unexpected.

Anyways, this album. I still enjoy CTRL a lot, and this album is a good argument for curation as there are MORE good songs than her previous album, but far more middling or bad songs too, and the ratio of good songs from old album:new album is worse than that for not so good songs. If you trimmed this down by about... 25-30 minutes, it could be a contender for my best of list. Unfortunately, with stuff like the horribly cringy Disney Channel homage F2F and pointless, borderline unfinished tracks like Conceited, this album stands as "good but flawed".

We'll see how 999 and 1000 look.

Best Track: IDK, listen for yourself and you pick, if there's one advantage to making a fucking 75 minute album of short songs, it's that you can make your own superior truncated version
Rating: 6.5/10