Share

Solána Imani Rowe (born November 8, 1989), known professionally as SZA , is an American singer-songwriter. Known for her diaristic lyrics and genre explorations, she has been credited as a prominent figure in influencing contemporary R&B music and popularizing alternative R&B.
SZA first garnered attention with her self-released extended plays (EPs) See.SZA.Run (2012) and S (2013). The projects led her to sign with Top Dawg Entertainment in 2013, through which she released her third EP, Z (2014). Her alternative R&B-imbued debut studio album, Ctrl (2017), was a critical and commercial success.

It earned four Grammy Award nominations in 2018 and became the second longest-charting R&B album by a woman on the US Billboard 200. Her 2018 single “All the Stars” with Kendrick Lamar was a top-10 single in the US and UK, and it earned her Golden Globe and Academy Award nominations for Best Original Song. SZA’s feature on Doja Cat’s “Kiss Me More” in 2021 set a record as the longest-running all-female collaboration in the US top-ten and won the singer her first Grammy Award.

SZA experimented with several genres like rock, hip-hop, and pop on her second studio album, SOS (2022). It has spent thirteen weeks at number one on the Billboard 200, broke several chart records, and set an achievement for the largest streaming week for an R&B album in the US. Its six singles include “Kill Bill” and “Snooze”, both of which ranked amongst the best-selling songs of 2023, peaking at number one and two on the US Billboard Hot 100, respectively. The album’s reissue, Lana (2024), spawned the top-ten singles “Saturn” and “30 for 30”. That same year, SZA collaborated with Lamar on the single “Luther”. It topped the Billboard Hot 100 for thirteen weeks, making it her longest-running number one in the US.

SZA has earned numerous accolades throughout her career, including five Grammy Awards, a Brit Award, an American Music Award, a Guild of Music Supervisors Award, and two Billboard Women in Music awards, including Woman of the Year. She has co-written songs for artists such as Nicki Minaj, Beyoncé, Travis Scott, Schoolboy Q, and Rihanna. In 2024, she received the Hal David Starlight Award from the Songwriters Hall of Fame.

Critics have frequently described SZA as an R&B singer-songwriter, a narrative for which she has expressed disdain since the beginning of her career. In 2014, when she uploaded the single “Teen Spirit” on SoundCloud, she tagged the song with the categories “Glitter Trap” and “Not R&B”. SZA’s earliest songs are built around dreamlike, psychedelic, and lo-fi instrumentals; she describes them as “hood, with feminine inflections.”

SZA identifies with the label “alternative”, a subgenre of R&B that borrows from other genres like rock music. Many of her songs from Ctrl have influences of alternative rock, whereas one track from SOS, “F2F”, is explicitly pop rock. In her view, her being described as a contemporary R&B artist in the media is restrictive and racially prejudiced. She considers it a byproduct of the racist segregation of Black artists from White artists during the 20th century, which industry professionals did by relegating Black people to R&B categories. Saying that Black music has never been limited to the genre, SZA told Consequence: “We started rock ‘n’ roll. Why can’t we just be expansive and not reductive?”