SZA announced on social media Monday that her long-delayed album “Lana” — a deluxe edition of her Grammy-winning second full-length “SOS” — will be released on Friday. The post features actor Ben Stiller singing along passionately with what is presumably the new single, “Drive,” while driving on a rainy night.
While SZA’s forthcoming stadium tour with Kendrick Lamar presents a prime opportunity to release new material — she’s been touring behind “SOS” since it was released two years ago — fans could be forgiven for skepticism, as there have been many false alarms. However, it seems that this time “Lana” is coming for real.
The latest round of teasers began a week ago, on the two-year anniversary of “SOS,” with a short video trailer that included a snippet of one of the album’s tracks. The video depicts SZA in a nature setting, pulling down her baggy camo pants to pee by a creek. She looks directly into the camera before taking a tissue out of her pocket to wipe herself up as the words “Lana” appear across the screen. She lyrics to the song go, “You know we got a real history/That’s the reason I can’t choose me/You know that dick been good to me/You make it hard for me to choose me.”
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While SZA has been talking about a deluxe edition of “SOS” since that album’s release, she explained the album and its to Variety in August of last year: “[‘Lana’] is outtakes [from ‘SOS’] and new stuff, too — I added a couple of songs. It’s like a whole new project. It’s called ‘Lana’ — my name but, it’s the first tattoo that I ever got, when I was 13. It was 10 bucks a letter and I only had 40, so that that became my nickname for no reason. ‘Lana’ is really just the B-side of SOS.”
A month later, on Sept. 8, she performed a free concert at the Brooklyn Navy Yard where she performed three songs from “Lana” and said, “The deluxe is a whole ’nother album, it’s seven to 10 songs and it’ll be out this fall.” The songs were dubbed by fans “Boy From South Detroit,” “DTM” and “Saturn,” which was released as a stand-alone single back in February, prompting another wave of false alarms about the album’s release.
But just a few weeks later, SZA became frustrated by fans leaking songs and posted that she would be “starting ‘Lana’ from scratch” because “y’all leaked three songs from the deluxe.” She continued, “At this point, y’all can keep the throwaways and leaks. I’ll be starting ‘Lana’ from scratch. Do not ask me about it again,” adding a few minutes later, “I’ll round up the leaks y’all already got and u can have those. Seems like a fair deal. ENJOY.” That tweet was deleted shortly afterward. In a subsequent series of tweets, she said the deluxe edition of SOS will now feature “the leaks and outtakes” and “Lana” will be its own album. “Lana deserves more time and music no one’s ever heard before,” she wrote. However, she seems to have reverted to her previous plan.
Will the long-delayed album finally arrive on Friday? As the ever-shifting saga of “Lana” shows, time will tell.