SZA Shares the Stories Behind Five Memorable Songs From 'CTRL' and 'SOS'

glamour.com:

CTRL and became the soundtrack of young Black womanhood. It also unwittingly put pressure on the follow-up album. How does anyone top a masterpiece?

But in the five years since CTRL's release, the artist has blessed us with tunes “Good Days” and “I Hate U” and offered a promising peek at what her highly-anticipated sophomore album SOS will deliver. "Screaming, crying, and throwing up out of anxiety and happiness," one fan tweeted about the unbearable wait for SOS.

While another wrote, “Girl, we don't care who you offend on the album, we'll protect you.”SZA may need that protection because she's coming for blood. (Figuratively, we hope.) “It's about heartbreak, it's about revenge, it's about being pissed,” she says of the feelings that followed the breakup of an 11-year relationship. “I've never raged the way that I should have.

This is my villain era, and I'm very comfortable with that.” But SZA's “villain era” could also just be described as radical self-acceptance. “It is in the way I say no, it's in the way I'm deciding what I'm taking, what I'm not taking," she says. “It's in the fucked up things that I don't apologize for.