Originally titled A, the debut album from SZA was meant to conclude a trilogy of self-titled releases following 2013’s S and 2014 ’s Z—her official entré into the music world. The release date was originally projected for summer 2016 and, as she revealed in an interview with Entertainment Weekly at the time, it was going to be a frank recounting of her romantic life, warts and all. “I’m talking a lot of grimy shit, but it’s truth,” she said. In the year the album sat in the wings with her label TDE, the fearless style of her grimy shit fermented into a powerful R&B set piece that is unlike any released in recent memory.
Over a lonely electric guitar riff on CTRL’s opening track ”Supermodel,” she sets the tone: “Let me tell you a secret/I been secretly banging your homeboy/Why you in Vegas all up on Valentine's Day?” This sorry setup isn’t fiction, either. In the same EW interview, she said that one of the songs on her album would be about her ex-boyfriend leaving her on Valentine’s Day while she slept with his friend as revenge. “[It] will be the first time he hears about it,” she said.
Boyfriends and more, ahem, casual acquaintances are taken to task across the album, but this isn’t a pity party. CTRL is about sexual freedom while still having your hunger for intimacy be taken seriously. On the woozy “Doves in the Wind,” SZA sings about Forrest Gump—not a figure running through her mind like Frank Ocean—but the kind of guy who sees women as more than just their bodies and who “deserve the whole box of chocolates.” Born Solána Rowe, the Jersey singer seems to take comfort in the freewheelin’ Forrest Gump character Jenny Curran (on Z track “Warm Winds,” SZA quotes young Jenny’s “Dear God, make me a bird so I can fly far, far away” prayer). But SZA finds solace in the sweetness offered to the adult Jenny by Forrest. That sentiment (without literal Gump references) bleeds through on tracks like the heartbreaking “Normal Girl,” about being unable to find a paramour who wants to take her home to meet his family, not just home to his bedroom. But when she sings, “I really wish I was a normal girl?” it’s a stinging reminder that with so many platforms to meet people, there are just that many more people to be hurt by. What if not finding an emotional connection means there’s something fundamentally wrong with you?