SZA

Solana Imani Rowe, known professionally as SZA, born November 8, 1989, in Maplewood, New Jersey, and raised partly in St. Louis, Missouri, is one of the most critically acclaimed and commercially successful R&B artists of her generation, a singer-songwriter of extraordinary emotional depth whose distinctive airy-then-powerful vocal delivery has made her the pre-eminent voice of intimate, confessional R&B in the late 2010s and 2020s. The daughter of a Muslim father and a Christian mother, she grew up with a spiritual richness and intellectual curiosity about identity that permeates her songwriting. She studied marine biology before dropping out of Delaware State University and moving to New York to pursue music. After a stint of homelessness in Brooklyn, she was signed to Top Dawg Entertainment — the label of Kendrick Lamar — and released the critically praised EPs See.SZA.Run (2012) and S (2013) before her debut studio album Ctrl (2017), one of the most acclaimed debut albums of the decade, which spent 279 weeks on the Billboard 200 — the longest run by an R&B female solo artist in the chart's history — and earned her five Grammy nominations. Her follow-up SOS (2022) debuted at number one on the Billboard 200, her first number-one album, and its single Kill Bill became a massive hit. SOS spent eighteen consecutive weeks at number one on the Billboard 200, breaking a record set by Whitney Houston in the early 1990s. She has received over twenty Grammy nominations and is recognized as one of the most significant R&B voices of the 21st century, an artist who brings literary sensibility and emotional honesty to a genre that too often settles for surface.