The Singles Jukebox

Don’t worry, we don’t have another Drake song this year…

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Alfred Soto: The cognoscenti know we’ve praised any number of hellion anthems by Gretchen Wilson’s to Miranda Lambert’s, but none of them rode the top ten last spring for months like “Kill Bill” and none of them included the line “I just shot my ex/Not the best idea” in a singsong as dangerous as an asp. SOS has more poignant tracks, and CTRL a wider palette, but on “Kill Bill” and a dozen others SZA projects the clarity and limpidness of a Saoirse Ronan. 
[8]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: By sheer listening volume alone, my song of the year. Every morning from January through to mid-April I would wake up and almost instantly put on “Kill Bill” — early-morning walks, showers, opening batteries of emails, all soundtracked by that ambivalent synth figure and those boom bap-lite drums. And yet I’m still not quite sure if “Kill Bill” is good; I’ve certainly listened to it more than any other SZA track, but would I defend it over any of the best songs off of Ctrl? Probably not — it’s too pat, too impressed by the cleverness of its own hook. But the qualities that annoy me about “Kill Bill” now are what endeared it to me in the first quarter of the year. In the bleakness of winter, a pop hit so niftily constructed (those guitars! the cute little switch in the last chorus! that hilarious faux-Jacob Collier choral breakdown!) was a little shard of joy.
[7]

Michael Hong: SOS felt like such a step down from CTRL, a bunch of fragmentary ideas primed for Instagram captions. “Kill Bill” is murmured with the notion that any of these lines could work; with such a shrug of an instrumental it’s wholly unremarkable.
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Joshua Minsoo Kim: I’m not asking for SZA to lay bare all her anxieties in the way she did across Ctrl, but SOS was the sort of record whose pathos felt market-tested. It was sprawling and more assured in its songwriting, but in ways that sanded down her personality. Never was that more clear than on “Kill Bill,” whose chorus is sung with a wink, meant to offset the more conversational tone of her verses. It lopes around with a decorum that does nothing but make her confessions more cerebral (derogatory). The arc of the melody telegraphs it all, prim in a way that invites one to consider the dissonance. It’s not interesting or clever or insightful, and SZA’s best songs are all those things without sacrificing immediacy. “God forbid an artist evolve,” someone might protest. Okay… we’re talking about a high-concept Tarantino track here.
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Katherine St Asaph: This is nice, but I’m worried it will result in Quentin Tarantino learning the word “yandere.”
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Harlan Talib Ockey: Remember that TikTok of Shakira singing along to this while mopping a carpet?
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Oliver Maier: SZA as cardboard cutout, hawking an unimaginative conceit that pales next to any number of other songs she has penned on the subject of jealousy and a topline so beneath her that it should have remained undiscovered in the Marianas Trench. When “Mad at Disney” feels like a fitting analogue, tonally and melodically, then there is a real problem. How’d she get here indeed.
[3]

Wayne Weizhen Zhang: SOS is a 23(!) track album, and “Kill Bill” is a squarely middling track, albeit one with an engaging, gimmicky premise. It’s great to see SZA finally get a radio hit, but I prefer the morning coffee intimacy of “Snooze,” mediative affirmations of “Good Days,” rizz of “Low” or “Conceited,” frenetic energy of the title track, or even the Maroon 5 sleaze of “F2F.”
[7]

Nortey Dowuona: SZA so fundamentally surpassed the game back with CTRL that her simply deciding to drag the R&B world kicking and screaming into the mainstream, even actually pushing rap back into the background, means she regressed. And by “regressed,” I mean making the best pop single of this year and last year. It speaks to the unadventurous nature of the industry and its defenders that SZA is comfortably playing on a radio station right now or streaming somewhere in this world rather than the many better or more critically approved-of R&B stars like Victoria Monét, Ari Lennox or…no actually, who? If SZA dropping a weaker pop album that comfortably beats the best in all genres is her on a B-game… what the fuck are we doing? As a critical class, we’re not supposed to be a recommendation service but a group of folks honestly engaging with the art, and even being harshly critical of it from time to time. But if we think that SZA put out a lesser album than her last one and became a superstar, maybe we shouldn’t even give her the time of day and cover Jaz Karis all day everyday forever, cuz otherwise we have to say this song ain’t it and wait for the SZA stan army to show up in our bergs to attack us for not recommending her but instead engaging with her. And quite frankly, nobody else this year in this genre who got recommended to me (even Sampha) wrote a lyric as good and catchy as “rather be in hell than alone.”
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Jonathan Bradley: I would prefer a song toying with murder to be sharper in execution than these concussed musings. “I’m so mature, I’m so mature” is a funny line, but SZA is so intent on mumbling her way through the rest of this boom-bap soup that not even that gag lands properly. A warped gramophone melody plays along the way; surely this strain of toy-goth eccentricity expired with the rest of Melanie Martinez’s career.
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Ian Mathers: Not sure how much the fanbases of SZA and Olivia Rodrigo overlap, but surely the “I’m so mature, I’m so mature” and “not the best idea” here got talked about in the same way we’ve been talking about some of the lines/line readings from Rodrigo’s singles, right? Right???
[8]

Brad Shoup: The louder the volume, the more the production sounds like a headcold. But I can put up with it for her refrain, which is positively baroque.
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Taylor Alatorre: One of the few singles from (roughly) this year that feels Important in the classicist, Rolling Stone sense: for its high-concept nature, its of-the-moment relevance, its place in the murder ballad lineage, and its instantly immortal sign-off lyric. The producers take no swings for the fences here, and their woozy and vaguely off-kilter feel lets the message mostly speak for itself, rather than risk pointing to a contradictory one. You could criticize SZA’s phrasing or tone for seeming not to recognize the gravity of the subject matter; such criticism won’t hold water among those for whom “showed no remorse” is a familiar journalistic cliché. And while it’s easy to play up the true-crime angle, the way that “Kill Bill” interprets the tragedy at is core is more interesting than that. More than mere “mind of a killer” exploitation, it invites us to consider that one of the lives lost to a murder is that of the murderer herself, and that the death of the victim is also the death of every other choice or circumstance that could have led to a different outcome.
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Leah Isobel: Babe, get a better therapist.
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