Sending an SOS to the World

It's Friday, and we’ve reached the last surviving space in the calendar where the ever-increasing deluge of new music slows down at least a little, giving us some breathing room to catch up on everything else that came out this year. Or at least everything that came out last week.

Or maybe not, because it’s a slim week but a good week for new music, topped by the SZA album the world’s been begging for since about three hours after she released her blockbuster debut five and a half years ago. Not quite RIHANNA levels of waiting for a followup, but close. The lead single came out two years ago. “I don't have any deadlines,” SZA said in October, “because at the end of the day, when my s*** comes out, it comes out.” She makes what you might call conversational emo R&B, with a compositional style that’s proved both influential and nearly impossible to mimic (you can try, though). She has supreme self-assurance, even within the deep anxiety she readily admits to. And her s**** has now come out.

SOS is 23 songs long, with cameos from PHOEBE BRIDGERS, TRAVIS SCOTT, DON TOLIVER and, via sampling, OL’ DIRTY BASTARD. (She planned on more features, she said earlier this week, but other would-be guests ghosted her. Stars, they really are just like us.) “It's about heartbreak, it's about being lost, it's about being pissed,” she told People. To wit, she tells us, in a catchy mid-tempo ballad named for a QUENTIN TARANTINO movie, she’s thinking of killing her ex, and also possibly his new girlfriend. Alternatively, she’ll just be sleeping around a bit (her language is more blunt than that) “’cause I really miss you,” according to another one that has a kind of AVRIL LAVIGNE energy at about the same tempo. Options. These, anyway, are some of the lines that jump out on a first listen while writing a short Friday morning rant because you’ve got new music to listen to.

Also today: Albums and EP from Mount Westmore (debut from the supergroup of Snoop Dogg, Ice Cube, E-40 and Too Short), Raw Poetic, A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie, ††† (Crosses) (side project of Deftones’ Chino Moreno and Far’s Shaun Lopez), María Becerra, Icewear Vezzo, Sha EK, Mercury, French Montana, Bun B. & Statik Selektah, Nina Hagen, Satoko Fuji (Japanese jazz pianist/composer’s 100th album as a leader, with a band that includes Wadada Leo Smith, Sara Schoenbeck and Ikue Mori), Photay With Carlos Niño, Dylan Henner, Nathan Salsburg, Leland Whitty (of BadBadNotGood), Donald Nally/The Crossing, the Sound of Animals Fighting, and Taken by Trees (EP of Colin Blunstone covers).

Closing Time

"KPOP" has been canceled—on Broadway that is, where the K-pop musical will close this weekend after just 17 performances (and one dust-up between the producers and the New York Times). "I don't feel defeated, I feel angry," composer HELEN PARK tells the Los Angeles Times in a thoughtful and emotional exit interview... FOX's country music drama MONARCH has been canceled after one season of so-so ratings.

Rest in Peace

JET BLACK, founding drummer of the Stranglers.