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SOS Deluxe: Lana

Shaad D’Souza

created: Jan. 6, 2025, 5:01 a.m. | updated: Aug. 11, 2025, 3:45 a.m.

These songs are packaged with that year’s mega-selling SOS under the title SOS Deluxe: Lana, but they function better on their own: Unlike the rambunctious, mixtape-y genre hopping of its predecessor, Lana is aesthetically coherent, filled with warm analog synths and soul-ballad tempos. There are fewer piquant quotables, but it feels less jittery than SOS, closer in tone to the SZA of 2017’s CTRL, who laid bare her fears and flaws with the casual affect of a model doing a “What’s in My Bag” video. Put these songs in their own playlist and you can proudly call Lana the third SZA album—one worthy of its predecessors. “My Turn” does a good deal of explaining why SZA, a bolder and weirder star than is usually embraced by the pop firmament, ended up with her name attached to SOS, one of the most successful R&B records of all time. But next to every song that asserts some kind of self-love through an act of emotional terrorism, SZA leaves an asterisk: She is incapable of sweeping her own culpability under the rug.

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