Almost Silenced by Her Inner Critic, SZA Is Now a Grammys Contender

As a songwriter, SZA is known for her acute self-awareness — she writes about the mechanics of desire and insecurity with such a penetrating gaze, her music can feel almost indecent to listen to. But that extraordinary instinct for self-examination can cause complications, too. The R&B singer, born Solána Rowe, second-guessed her debut album so thoroughly that it was delayed for a year. The head of her record label says that self-doubt is her “kryptonite.”

In a rehearsal space on the edge of Manhattan in December, where the Los Angeles-based artist was practicing for a performance on “Saturday Night Live,” her kryptonite announced itself. She recalled the stinging experience of working on her album “Ctrl,” released last summer.

“My anxiety had been telling me the whole time that it sucked,” said the singer, 27, soft-spoken and unreserved in a fluorescent-lit office. In an oversized woolly sweater, with one foot in a chunky Balenciaga sneaker slung reflexively over the top of a wooden desk, she could still enumerate the record’s flaws.

Its sonic palette was too shallow, she said; its concepts and word choices were too redundant; its hooks could have been stronger. At one point while recording it, she threatened on Twitter to quit music altogether. When her label intervened and scheduled the album for release, she said, she “just wanted to hurry up and fail.”

But the opposite happened. “Ctrl” emerged as one of the year’s most critically acclaimed albums and became a talisman for young women, particularly young women of color, who saw themselves in its unflinching parables of sexual liberation and emotional liability. At the 60th annual Grammy Awards on Sunday night, she is the most nominated woman, with five nods, including best new artist.

After last year’s ceremony, where Beyoncé's best album faced defeat and Frank Ocean’s abstention prompted sharp criticism and sparked the #GrammysSoWhite hashtag, SZA is at the forefront of a wave of ethnically diverse young artists (including 19-year-old singer Khalid and Donald Glover’s hip-hop adjacent alter ego Childish Gambino) who swept nominations in many of the top categories this year.

All the accolades have left her inner critic bereft. SZA said the experience — of persistent self-suspicion colliding with overwhelming external praise — had so unmoored her that she came up with a name for the condition: “dysmorphia.”

“You wonder, ‘Are you delusional? Is something wrong with you?'” she said. “I never imagined anything like this would happen in a million years.”

Part of her still can’t. “I guess I’ll have to re-evaluate my life,” she said, asked what she’ll do if she ends up winning a Grammy. A compliment, for her, has become a kind of crisis, too. “Because then the dysmorphia would really be hitting a peak.”

In an industry where the youngest stars radiate the most heat, SZA was a relatively late bloomer. She self-released her first EP at 22 and came to music as a refuge from jobs as a bartender and a sales assistant on the floor at Sephora. She was born to a Catholic communications executive mother and a Muslim television producer father in St. Louis. The family moved to suburban Maplewood, New Jersey, when she was 10.

As a child, her life was circumscribed by gymnastics practice and Islamic prep school, realms where discipline and accountability were sacrosanct. Music was freeing, low pressure.

“I was just kind of stumbling through it, very novice,” she said of the first songs she wrote at the urging of her brother, a rapper. “It was music made in a closet with beats stolen off the internet.”

In 2011, SZA was working part time for a streetwear company in New York when she met the president of Top Dawg Entertainment, Terrence Henderson, known as Punch. He was in town for a concert headlined by the label’s star artist, Kendrick Lamar, which happened to be sponsored by her employer. Henderson heard SZA’s music — a friend took the initiative and played it for him, to the singer’s horror — and didn’t bite at first. But he kept in touch and ended up signing her three years later.

The two EPs SZA released on her own in the interim — “See.SZA.Run” (2012) and “S” (2013) — were early salvos in a revolution in R&B. They shared as much DNA with hip-hop, Björk and left-of-center electronic music of artists like Toro y Moi and Purity Ring, as they did with Brandy or Jill Scott, inspiring comparisons to contemporary iconoclasts like the Weeknd and Frank Ocean.

Her lyrics at the time were a world away from the open diary of “Ctrl.” Songs like “Time Travel Undone” and “Aftermath” were saturated in oblique imagery and abstract symbolism. And, as if to complete the obfuscation, her vocals were submerged in reverb and atmospherics, giving them a disembodied quality.

When critics accused her of mistaking style for substance, she took it to heart.

“People would say [expletive] like ‘I don’t know who she is, I don’t know what she’s talking about, this is boring,'” SZA said. “And I realized that I was bored with myself. I was just feeling and emoting with no structure and no intent.”

On “Ctrl,” her objectives were transparency and humanity. She wanted to exhibit a red-blooded mind and body at work, to give voice to everything she had once concealed.

On “Supermodel,” the album’s opening track, she jabs an absent beau with spiteful taunts (“You was a temporary lover”) before turning the knife on herself (“Why am I so easy to forget?”). On the single “Drew Barrymore,” a confession of putative sins (“I’m sorry I’m not more ladylike, I’m sorry I don’t shave my legs at night”) becomes a defiant rallying cry. The writer and producer Issa Rae, who used multiple songs from “Ctrl” in Season 2 of her HBO series “Insecure,” said it was SZA’s sharp turn toward candor that made her take notice.

“She’s tapping into raw emotions and personal stories in an unapologetic way,” Rae said. “Her earlier stuff was more of like a vibe to me, but now I feel like she’s a whole person who I recognize as someone I might know.”

Like “Insecure” — and the surprise blockbuster of last summer, the movie “Girls Trip” — the specificity of “Ctrl” gave it particular resonance among a generation of young black women who have been underserved by mainstream entertainment.

“It felt like ours,” Rae said of the album. “She was talking about experiences that I could relate to, and that the women that I know can relate to, and that was just such a pleasant surprise.”

SZA said “Ctrl” was inspired in part by stereotypes about overbold black women and her desire to reclaim them in her personal life. It’s a theme she had previewed before, in songs that ended up on projects by Nicki Minaj and Beyoncé (“Feeling Myself,” 2014) and Rihanna (“Consideration,” 2016).

“I don’t feel ashamed to be loud, which is an argument I’ve had with lots of men, who thought I was too sassy and unladylike,” she said. “A lot of black women get that rap, ‘You’re loud, and unsavory, or crass or abrasive.’ But I feel like that [expletive] is beautiful as hell.” The album’s unblinking, value-neutral depictions of sex and lust fed into a wider thread of visible female musicians asserting their sexual agency in their art. Like recent work by Cardi B, Tove Lo and Rihanna, it disavowed ingrained scripts in popular music, in which promiscuous men play and virtuous women get played. In her videos for “Supermodel” and “The Weekend,” she seduces the camera without being objectified by it.

“I think a lot of sexuality was only taboo before because women weren’t allowed to talk about it — but women aren’t waiting for permission right now,” SZA said.

Though she forgot to vote for herself at the Grammys (“I’m a mess,” she said) and all but expects the best new artist award to go to one of her competitors — she’s up against rapper Lil Uzi Vert and singers Julia Michaels, Alessia Cara and Khalid — SZA said she was encouraged that the Recording Academy had recognized so many artists of different racial backgrounds.

“I think music is honest and will make you do honest things,” she said. Her nominations have inspired her to rededicate herself to making more ambitious music, including a planned collaboration with producer Mark Ronson (“Uptown Funk”) and Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker, with whom she said she had recorded three songs.

Since “Ctrl” was released, her concerts and meet-and-greets have become a kind a group therapy. Fans tell her about their love lives, deepest fears and private traumas. “I thought that these were just my lonely thoughts and that I was going to put them out to pasture,” SZA said. “But they weren’t out to pasture. Other people said, ‘Hey, I have lonely thoughts, too.'”

Henderson said that SZA’s most passionate admirers are often the most vulnerable. “A lot of what she says is what people think but can’t articulate,” he said.

The outpouring has shifted the artist’s estimation of her work. If “dysmorphia” is a distortion of perspective, the treatment may simply be recognizing that the distortion is there, and surrounding yourself with reliable witnesses.

Recently, they’ve given her inner critic some competition.

“It’s like God is slapping you in the face,” SZA said of the response to “Ctrl.” Then she translated what God had to say: “There’s something happening and you need to be grateful and you need to be present. I’m sorry that you’re scared, but this is your job.

“Ready?”