Hot 21 Radio

SZA

Nominations in five categories at the 2018 Grammy Awards confirmed SZA's arrival as a new leader of modern-day R&B, laying the brickwork for a career that would soon include chart-topping albums and more than a dozen multi-platinum singles. Born as "Solána Imani Rowe" in St Louis, Missouri, on November 8, 1989, she was raised in Maplewood, New Jersey, as an orthodox Muslim. She briefly studied liberal arts in college but dropped out to concentrate on her music, adopting the name SZA (partly in reference to fellow rapper RZA) along the way. With homemade early recordings, she self-released her debut EP See.SZA.Run in 2012 and was subsequently signed to the hip-hop label Top Dawg. Ctrl, her full-length debut album, followed in 2017 and reached Number 3 on the Billboard 200, as well as Number 1 on the Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums chart. The hit singles "Love Galore," "The Weekend," and "Broken Clocks" helped drive this popularity, as did her Top 10 duet with Kendrick Lamar, "All the Stars," which appeared on the Black Panther soundtrack in 2018. "All the Stars" wasn't her only collaboration, with SZA also teaming up with Maroon 5 for "What Lovers Do" (which hit Number 9 on the Hot 100) and earning a Grammy Award for "Best Pop Duo/Group Performance" with her Doja Cat duet, "Kiss Me More." One of the biggest hits of 2021, "Kiss Me More" was followed in 2022 by SZA's second album, SOS, which reached Number 1 in multiple countries (including the US, Canada, and the Netherlands) and spawned the Number 1 R&B single "I Hate U."