SZA teases ‘Lana’ album with Ben Stiller video

While SZA’s upcoming 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 being skeptical, as there have been plenty of false alarms. However, it seems that this time “Lana” is coming for real.

The latest round of teasers began a week ago, on 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 natural setting, pulling down her baggy camo pants to pee by a stream. She looks directly into the camera before taking a tissue from her pocket to dry herself off as the words “Lana” appear across the screen. Her lyrics for the song read: “You know we got a real history/That’s why I can’t choose me/You know that dick was good to me/You make it hard for me to choose me.”

While SZA has talked about a deluxe edition of “SOS” since the album’s release, she explained the album and its Black in August of last year: “(‘Lana’) is outtakes (from ‘SOS’) and also new stuff — I added a few songs. It’s like a whole new project. It’s called ‘Lana’ — my name, but it’s the first tattoo I ever got when I was 13. It was 10 bucks a letter, and I was only 40, so it became my nickname for no reason. ‘Lana’ is really just the B-side of SOS.”

A month later, on September 8, she performed a free concert at the Brooklyn Navy Yard where she performed three songs from “Lana” and said, “Deluxe is a whole different album, it’s seven to 10 songs, and it’s coming out in the fall.” Dubbed by fans “Boy From South Detroit,” “DTM” and “Saturn,” the songs were released as a standalone single back in February, sparking another wave of false alarms about the album’s release.

But just a few weeks later, SZA got frustrated with fans who were leaking songs, writing that she wanted to “start ‘Lana’ from scratch” because “Y’all leaked three songs from the deluxe.” She continued, “At this point you can keep the boxes and leaks. I’m starting ‘Lana’ from scratch. Don’t ask me about it again,” adding a few minutes later, “I’ll collect the leaks you already have and you can have them. It seems like a fair deal. ENJOY.” That tweet was deleted soon after. In a subsequent series of tweets, she said that the deluxe edition of SOS will now contain “leaks and outtakes” and “Lana” will be its own album. “Lana deserves more time and music that no one has 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-changing saga of “Lana” shows, time will tell.