Reading on mobile? Click here to listen
Hometown: Maplewood, New Jersey.
The lineup: Solana Rowe (vocals).
The background: We're not saying we're excited about SZA or anything, but we do think the music she is making does as much to advance the cause of the female R&B musician as Drake, the Weeknd, Miguel and Frank Ocean did for the male variety. Her EP, See.SZA.Run, which came out in the States last year and gets a release here next month, is the next logical step for indie or alt R&B – and we use those appellations because we haven't heard a sound this far out on an equivalent major label release since the glory days of Aaliyah and Timbaland. Imagine Aaliyah in the afterlife, or Solange in space – this music sounds as though it's coming at you from the other side, or the outer limits. The production on tracks such as Euphraxia, Advil, Crack Dreams, Once Upon a High, and Time Travel Undone (compare those titles with, say, the ones on the latest Rihanna album, with their rote language and love tropes) is INSANE, a mindblowing murk of billowing synths, bombing bass and crushed beats. Amid it all is a voice that's just another gorgeous, gaseous spectre in the mist/mix. It's like some outrageous culmination of all our favourite recent initiatives: witch house, chillwave, cloud rap, ethereal R&B: Cassie sings the Cocteau Twins with Syd tha Kid at the controls for the TriAngle label, or something.
Solana Rowe was born in St.Louis but has lived her whole life in New Jersey. She calls herself SZA (pronounced letter by letter), and not surprisingly loves RZA from the Wu-Tang Clan, as well as John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Billie Holiday and Björk. Lately, she's been listening to a lot of Animal Collective and Ella Fitzgerald.
Her lyrics are inscrutable, adding to the atmosphere of pleasant torpor/stupor, but those titles (especially Advil, Crack Dreams and Once Upon a High, obviously) hint at a desire to retreat or escape from the worldly and everyday. The production – by, variously, Felix Snow and Patrick Lukens, BrandUn DeShay, ApSuperProducer and Top Notch, any one of whom could, for all we know, become the next Darkchild – goes beyond hippie trippiness to bring a sense of radiant splendour and rapt stupefaction.
On Ice.Moon, SZA sings: "Show me a way to a higher place". You can hear how, in lesser hands, the voice would have made that line an unsubtle rallying cry, belted or bellowed out. Here, though, it's one-part gospel to two-parts celestial warble. Country is breathtakingly pretty, blues and soul from Venus and Mars. Bed is like Ciara if she met a producer up to the task of creating the right context for her sugar hiccup. Euphraxia finds SZA waxing esoteric about existentialism and the like, searching for answers over a clipped clatter – it's like some future hip-hop made by a band on 4AD in 1985. Crack Dreams obviates the necessity for the titular narcotic with its tranquilising bleepscape. Time Travel Undone is the one, though, the surest sign of the uncharted places SZA intends to go. It's like hearing a glimpse of the Björk-Beyoncé collaboration that will never be, a new kind of avant-jazz pop: unorthodox and untrammelled, yet accessible enough for repeat plays. Once Upon a High closes an EP of superb quality and distinction and introduces an artist with a vision singular enough to demand everyone's attention, not just those waiting for R&B to ascend to the next level. Which it might already have done here.
The buzz: "Super icy and chilled."
The truth: She's one possible future for female R&B.
Most likely to: Work with RZA.
Least likely to: With with ODB.
What to buy: See.SZA.Run is released in April.
File next to: Jhene Aiko, Cassie, Solange, the Internet.
Links: https://soundcloud.com/justsza/ice-moon-prod-felix-snow.
Monday's new band: Casual Sex.
