SZA. Photo by Amy Sussman/Getty Images.
SZA performed “Snooze” and “Kill Bill” during her set at the 66th Annual Grammy Awards. During “Kill Bill,” a dancer showed off kitana tricks on Phoebe Bridgers’s table before joining other dancers for a choreographed duel onstage.
Both tracks come from SOS, SZA’s second studio album. The record ranked 25th on our best albums of 2023 list and topped the Billboard 200 chart for 22 weeks, the longest run since 1990. Since dropping that project, she’s shared alternate versions of several of its tracks — enlisting Lizzo, Doja Cat, and Justin Bieber as featured guests — and collaborated on new music with Drake and Jean Dawson. In May, she’ll headline Primavera Sound Barcelona alongside Pulp and Lana Del Rey.
In a Rolling Stone cover story earlier in October, SZA spoke on her experience at the 2018 Grammys, where she performed songs from her debut LP, Ctrl, and was nominated for five awards but left empty-handed. “The Grammy room is one of the weirdest rooms ever,” she told RS. “There is so much wanting in there. Wanting to be noticed, wanting to be, like, acknowledged, to win, wanting to just be amongst n***as in the room, wanting to feel valuable or validated. All of us are in there striving for something. It means something, even though, like, this isn’t everything. But it’s kind of important that I’m here. It kind of matters.”
The same profile quoted SZA’s manager — Top Dog Entertainment president Terrence “Punch” Henderson — as saying the New Jersey-born artist’s team had pulled the plug on a scheduled performance at the 2023 MTV Video Music Awards after learning she hadn’t been nominated for Artist of the Year.
“It wasn’t not getting nominated,” Punch explained. “The ultimate disrespect is you don’t even want to discuss why she wasn’t nominated or what the criteria was. When I asked about the Artist of the Year nomination, they were basically like, ‘She got nominated for a bunch of other ones.’ And to me, that felt like, ‘Shut up and dribble.’”
