For a lot of a Glastonbury headliner, the Sunday evening 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, gives 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 probably a tricky promote, much less cultural colossus than a secret shared between hundreds of thousands.
However a four-day stint on the planet’s largest and most beloved green-field music competition brings a couple of advantages. Together with the pinballing feelings come fellow feeling and fraternity. Although not but a family title within the UK – “SZA who?” requested the uninitiated – she is the right conduit for our heightened empathy, too cerebral to boost the roof however potent sufficient to eke out our final reserves of euphoria.
Rising from a stage set that’s half ice cave, half historical Egyptian palace, she begins by slingshotting from the string swells of “PSA” right into a frenzied “Love Galore”, sporting a tasselled bronze costume and backed by a clan of piston-pumping dancers.
She sings traces reminiscent of “Why you hassle me when you recognize you bought a lady?” as if, just like the knackered weekenders in attendance, she have been within the midst of some devastating fever dream.
The high-octane manufacturing and reside 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”, kind dozens of micro mosh pits.
Seemingly performing out her personal madcap fairytale on the flowery 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, typically distracting from the intoxicating melisma and half-rapped confessions that, given her full consideration, regularly depart 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 evening falls and the group 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 evening 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, relatively than spoon-feeding us fireworks and feels, makes this melancholy, oddly intimate spectacle hit simply that little bit tougher. For one evening, at the least, the key was out, permitting SZA and Glastonbury’s downtrodden trustworthy to endure in solidarity.
