For a lot of a Glastonbury headliner, the Sunday night time crowd is the ripest of low-hanging fruit. Survivors are sleepless, stressed and mentally depleted, weak to the laziest heartstring thrums and the faintest pangs of nostalgia.
However an artist like SZA, the 34-year-old singer born Solána Imani Rowe, presents neither. After Dua Lipa’s laser-guided precision and Coldplay’s pyrotechnic catharsis, SZA – a Grammy-sweeping R&B phenom with an arsenal of candid heartbreakers – is maybe a troublesome promote, much less cultural colossus than a secret shared between thousands and thousands.
However a four-day stint on the planet’s largest and most beloved green-field music pageant brings a couple of advantages. Together with the pinballing feelings come fellow feeling and fraternity. Although not but a family identify within the UK – “SZA who?” requested the uninitiated – she is the right conduit for our heightened empathy, too cerebral to lift the roof however potent sufficient to eke out our final reserves of euphoria.
Rising from a stage set that’s half ice cave, half historic Egyptian palace, she begins by slingshotting from the string swells of “PSA” right into a frenzied “Love Galore”, carrying a tasselled bronze gown and backed by a clan of piston-pumping dancers.
She sings strains resembling “Why you hassle me when you understand you bought a girl?” as if, just like the knackered weekenders in attendance, she had been within the midst of some devastating fever dream.
The high-octane manufacturing and stay band proceed the trajectory from CTRL – her quietly star-making 2017 album – to 2022 follow-up SOS, the US chart-topper that rescaled her bed room confessionals for supersized intimacy. Each musical flourish comes with fairy lights, every pregnant pause stretched like a balloon able to pop.
The group – one of many sparsest in latest reminiscence – has loads of room for followers to behave out theatrical serenades and, amid the pop-punk blaze of “FWF”, type dozens of micro mosh pits.
Seemingly appearing out her personal madcap fairytale on the frilly set, SZA straddles an enormous mannequin ant, grinds a throne-shaped humanoid, twirls twin katanas for a dance sequence and ascends a lifesize tree trunk in fairy wings earlier than busting into her verse from Drake’s “Wealthy Child Daddy”. The choreography is reliably intense, generally distracting from the intoxicating melisma and half-rapped confessions that, given her full consideration, often go away you breathless.
A medley of Doja Cat collaboration “Kiss Me Extra” and a shock cowl of Prince’s “Kiss” is completely timed, hitting simply as night time falls and the gang begins hungering for a celebration.
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However highlights like “Supermodel” – a snapshot of social anxiousness, standing anxiousness, petty jealousy and self-recrimination delivered in a tone of ennui and apology – might no more sharply distinction the empowerment anthems of contemporaries like Friday night time headliner Dua Lipa. No room for Radical Optimism, as Lipa’s second album title has it. SZA is the ambassador for radical nihilism.
By nearer “Twentysomethings”, she has introduced her contingent of diehards to a dream state of ecstasy and emotional break, albeit with out straining to make new converts. That she made us work for it, slightly than spoon-feeding us fireworks and feels, makes this melancholy, oddly intimate spectacle hit simply that little bit more durable. For one night time, not less than, the key was out, permitting SZA and Glastonbury’s downtrodden devoted to undergo in solidarity.
