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This past Christmas, a girl you knew in high school recused herself from the family dinner table, shut herself in her teenage bedroom and, illuminated by the light of her sunset lamp, sent 13 back-to-back texts that all turned green. All the while, she screamed along to her new mantra: “My turn, mine to do the hurtin’/Your turn to bear the burdеn/My turn, ’cause I deservе this.”
It was an early gift from SZA (which still managed to arrive a little late): 15 diaphanous new songs that are beautiful but frequently as antagonistic as fiberglass dust, peaking with “My Turn,” a revenge anthem less violent than 2022’s inescapable murder fantasy “Kill Bill” but no less twisted. These songs are packaged with that year’s mega-selling SOS under the title SOS Deluxe: Lana, but they function better on their own: Unlike the rambunctious, mixtape-y genre hopping of its predecessor, Lana is aesthetically coherent, filled with warm analog synths and soul-ballad tempos. There are fewer piquant quotables, but it feels less jittery than SOS, closer in tone to the SZA of 2017’s CTRL, who laid bare her fears and flaws with the casual affect of a model doing a “What’s in My Bag” video. Put these songs in their own playlist and you can proudly call Lana the third SZA album—one worthy of its predecessors.
“My Turn” does a good deal of explaining why SZA, a bolder and weirder star than is usually embraced by the pop firmament, ended up with her name attached to SOS, one of the most successful R&B records of all time. Aside from, perhaps, Charli XCX, SZA is the only pop star who truly meets Our Moment on its own terms: She takes the emotional landscape of TikTok—a world where therapy terms are abused, no one can agree which flags are red, and everyone is “crashing out,” a favorite SZAism—and wraps it up in her own kind of pop classicism, a stew that on Lana contains elements of Latin jazz, new age, psych-rock, soul, and ’90s R&B, among many other things. This (on-paper) clash of form and function means that SZA’s music feels both electrifyingly current and built to last—a balance many of her chart peers have struggled to strike.
But next to every song that asserts some kind of self-love through an act of emotional terrorism, SZA leaves an asterisk: She is incapable of sweeping her own culpability under the rug. Unlike Ariana Grande, whose latest album eternal sunshine was filled with ersatz therapy platitudes (and conspicuously free of genuine conflict), SZA lays bare the ways in which the idea of “looking out for number one” can become a cope for toxic behavior. “My Turn” is explicit in its desire to inflict pain; “Crybaby,” a gorgeous, sunkissed ballad where SZA bemoans her inability to stop “blaming the world for my faults,” ends with the dryly hilarious refrain, “I know you told stories about me/Most of them awful, all of them true.” Many stars brandish “authenticity” hoping their fans will be too besotted to see it as another kind of costume; SZA pays for hers song by song, never condescending to her audience.
That willingness to showcase emotional mess carries over from SOS proper, but Lana is an altogether more subtle album: Its crush songs don’t carry as many caveats, and there are few outright vindictive or depressive moments in the vein of “I Hate U” or “Ghost in the Machine.” The sprawled-out R&B track “Diamond Boy (DTM),” luxuriates in the warmth of new affection; the arrangement is spacious but sophisticated, ending with a fleet, filtered rap verse that sounds totally disconnected from the song’s noodling guitar and enveloping blasts of sub-bass. It’s a sweet, canny outro—a musical manifestation of quieting racing thoughts to better enjoy the moment. The soaring “Another Life” is a breakup song, but it’s just as generous, poignant without any reservation: “I don’t care who you marry/Mine, mine, mine, mine, mine, mine, mine/Maybe in another life.” In the two years since SOS, SZA’s outlook has shifted, becoming more graceful and optimistic without losing its sense of tension; now, she just seems more interested in finding inner peace than capturing the attention of any one fuckboy. As she sings on “No More Hiding,” an album opener that combines delicate, bossa-nova-ish guitar and a yearning synth line and ends up sounding like it sprung from the same patch of alien wilderness she stands in on the album cover: “I wanna feel sun on my skin/Even if it burns or blinds me/I wanna be purified within.”
That softer outlook is reflected in the feel of Lana, which bridges the gap between CTRL’s lush, ambling indie R&B and the aggressively hook-forward nature of SOS. Although Lana sounds undeniably like a major label pop album, its component parts can only be described as NTS Breakfast Show-core: The sample of Mort Garson’s “Plantasia” that runs throughout “Saturn” turns it into something wondrous and exploratory, mirroring the shivery, extraterrestrial qualities of SZA’s voice, while an errant interpolation of “The Girl From Ipanema” adds a wrinkle to the smiley TikTok pop of “BMF.” “Kitchen,” which makes a strong challenge for the title of SZA’s most luminescent song, turns the Isley Brothers’ “Voyage to Atlantis” into what feels like an Alvvays ballad, its unfussy arrangement and hazy ambiance glowing with the luster of a full moon. SZA’s voice is better suited to this kind of earthiness, which only appeared in flashes on SOS, as are her hooks, which are always indelible but rarely lean; the chorus of “Kitchen,” which flutters along like a piece of pollen on the wind, feels of a piece with music that’s more freeform and ingenious.
Throughout Lana, SZA sounds totally sure in her ability to command a stadium-sized audience with music that’s ambling and sometimes insular. “Drive,” a highlight toward the album’s end, is a rare moment of metatext. Over plaintive guitar, SZA unleashes a series of stream-of-consciousness verses about all the anxiety that roils underneath Lana, feelings of grandeur and self-doubt and contempt: “I keep pretending everyone’s as good as me/Shit’s so weird I cannot speak/Balled so hard, I think I peaked.” At the chorus, she stops abruptly and begins to sing: “Just drivin’/Just tryna get my head right/It’ll all be better when I/Just gotta get my head right.” SZA’s music can feel claustrophobic at times simply because of how deeply it is rooted in her own thoughts. “Drive,” on the other hand, feels infinite—the sound of total freedom.
During a 2008 interview, Prodigy of Mobb Deep was asked if he ever feared death. Mortality followed him in every lyric he delivered, and few artists could capture that deep chill you feel when survival becomes part of your everyday life. His response carried the same tough energy that defined him, shaped by the reality of Queensbridge: “Every day I wake up like, ‘This might be my last day, and I’m not scared of it.’ I’m never scared to bite my tongue about something, or to come out and speak about something. Like, I ain’t scared of death. What you gonna do to me?”
Nine years later, at only 42, he passed away in a way that felt both tragic and strangely ordinary. While on tour with Havoc in Las Vegas, he was hospitalized for complications tied to his lifelong struggle with sickle cell anemia. There, he accidentally choked while eating alone and died. (His family would later file a wrongful death lawsuit against the hospital.)
Havoc spent years mourning his brother and bandmate, unsure how to properly honor him through music. “You wanna do something to send your comrade off with a 21-gun salute…because he deserves that,” he said recently on the Bootleg Kev podcast. With help from longtime collaborator the Alchemist, Havoc pieced together Infinite, Mobb Deep’s ninth album and part of Mass Appeal’s Legend Has It series. It marks the first posthumous release in the collection, which always comes with its own challenges. Yet Infinite flows as smoothly as any project of its kind. For better and worse, it feels like an album the duo could’ve released after 2014’s somewhat forgettable The Infamous Mobb Deep, an update to their signature gritty sound with a few hints of modern polish.
On paper, it feels like everything has been rewound. Aside from a brief COVID reference and one cringey Havoc line about getting canceled for a joke about chromosomes, most of the lyrics are either locked in time (“Taj Mahal” references the old Trump casino) or so universal they could live anywhere. Instead of calling on a team of producers like they did for Infamous, Havoc handles 11 of the 15 tracks himself, with Alchemist revisiting the dirty, menacing textures he perfected on Murda Muzik and Infamy for the remaining four.
The strongest Havoc beats from Mobb Deep’s golden era twisted familiar sounds into something dangerous. That edge is still there on songs like “The M. The O. The B. The B.” and “Mr. Magik,” where the tension mixes with the quieter, stripped-down percussion style he used on Kanye’s The Life of Pablo. It gives the low-end even more power. Meanwhile, Alchemist falls back into the rugged rhythms that made his name — dusty drums and echoing samples. The shimmering haze of “Taj Mahal” feels like something from an old Street Sweepers mixtape, while “Score Points” and “My Era” would fit perfectly on one of his earlier collaborations with Prodigy.
Prodigy is present on every track, never halfway in. He raps at least one verse on each song and even takes on some of the hooks. His voice is as cold and sharp as ever (“RIP, you can’t son me/My pop’s dead,” he spits on “My Era”), even when his writing circles back to familiar themes. There are still small gaps here and there, but Havoc and Alchemist treat his vocals with care. What matters most is that the bond between Havoc and Prodigy still feels unbroken. They were never flashy lyricists or complex writers — their power came from directness, from how rooted they stayed in LeFrak City no matter how far their fame reached. “Mr. Magik” gets closest to that old-school Mobb Deep feel, especially when they pass the mic back and forth, going at rivals, dodging CIA agents, and spending nights with mistresses. The same goes for “Easy Bruh,” a song driven by drums, faint piano keys, sirens, and some of Prodigy’s sharpest lines on the album (“Niggas mad? Put a cape on ’em/Now they super mad” actually made me laugh out loud). At its best, Infinite feels effortless, Mobb Deep comfortable in their seasoned, world-weary selves.
Things drift off when the production stretches too far or leans toward trends. Some guest spots make perfect sense, like Big Noyd showing up on “The M. The O. The B. The B.” with his trademark nasal intensity, or Ghostface and Raekwon bringing color and life to “Clear Black Nights.” But the Clipse feature on “Look at Me” feels more trendy than meaningful, and Nas, another close ally, drops in with one of those standard Mass Appeal-style verses that sound recycled from his recent albums. “Down For You,” which flips Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings” into a hard-hitting love track, is a welcome addition to Mobb Deep’s catalog of street romance. Still, it loses impact when it reappears later on, this time swapping Jorja Smith’s hook for one by H.E.R. I can understand the decision, the beat goes hard — but it’s hard to take Nas seriously when he’s rapping about keeping a side chick like Tony Soprano. It’s one of the few moments that feels forced, and because there are so few, they stand out more.
Posthumous rap albums in the last decade have often been tangled in questions of control and exploitation. Thankfully, Infinite avoids those traps. It doesn’t carry the awkward tension that surrounded Gang Starr’s One of The Best Yet, nor does it feel stitched together the way DMX’s Exodus did. It never feels like Havoc or anyone else is cashing in on Prodigy’s legacy. In fact, it’s moving to hear them side by side again, even when Prodigy’s words hit too close, meditating on death while “staring up at the cosmos” on “Pour The Henny,” or dodging enemies both real and imagined as he gambles in Atlantic City. Still, much of the album feels like a return to familiar ground, reworking echoes of their strongest years. There are no moments that reach the levels of The Infamous or Hell on Earth, but Infinite does succeed in giving one of hip-hop’s greatest duos one final, heartfelt ride.
