SZA on Topping Charts, Making New Music, and Opting Out of Feuds

“I fucked up,” SZA tells me.

It’s been about a month and a half since the singer returned home to Los Angeles after wrapping her first international co-headlining stadium tour. It was the capper to an exemplary 2025 that included costarring in her first feature film and a single that spent 13 consecutive weeks at the top spot on the Billboard Hot 100—a run that began shortly after she appeared in February’s Super Bowl halftime show. She’s been in go mode for the majority of the year. How then, after finally coming off the road in August, did she downshift and decompress?

Dress and scarf by Dolce & Gabbana. Shoes by Gianvito Rossi. Ring (on right index finger) by Kallati. All other jewelry, her own.

She didn’t, and therein lies where she fucked up. “I had no comedown,” SZA, born Solána Imani Rowe, says in a tone that registers as half-amused, half-disappointed in herself. “I came back and I just went right into some bullshit. I don’t know why I’m back in the studio making a whole other album, just doing a whole bunch of shit. Spending time outside of my house for days at a time. I feel so frazzled.”

Nighttime is falling over Burbank as SZA—in comfy blue track pants, red curls blanketing her face, the first of several joints she will smoke tonight nestled between her fingers—settles into a plush sectional at her recording studio. Walking through an arched door and into the oasis of the studio is akin to passing through one of those secret doors in Narnia. Outside, it’s an otherwise drab block surrounded by warehouses and storage facilities, but once you step over the threshold you may as well be in paradise: Wood-paneled walls, walkways adorned with greenery, and ’70s soul playing softly come together to create tranquility and stillness. Despite the quiet, you can still feel the industriousness of the space: Lattes and ginger teas for late-night sessions are being brewed; musicians materialize to work out a guitar melody in the common room before disappearing back into the booth.

Beyond a couple more gates is the studio room that has been SZA’s home away from home when she’s not getting into pointedly undefined “bullshit.” Recording sessions notwithstanding, she has no immediate plans to release another album anytime soon, maybe not even in 2026 at all. But she wanted to meet here because this is just where she is these days, seeking respite from that frazzled energy—or, more likely, harnessing it—and trying to figure out what comes next after the biggest year in her career.

“It feels like the culmination of everything—everything I’ve worked towards in my career in one year,” SZA says, pensively, of 2025, a year in which she neither released nor promoted an entirely new record. “It didn’t come after I dropped an album, so it felt weird. I didn’t know how to place it. I’m like, Why am I getting these accolades? What’s going on? It was just so random. But I’m still grateful. I’m just trying to process it.”