Towards the end of her set, SZA informs the audience that she was “so nervous to be here”. You can understand why. Of all the headlining artists at this year’s Glastonbury, the announcement of SZA seemed to cause the most consternation. It wasn’t the kind of dreary what-about-indie-rock complaining that used to attend the unveiling of any hip-hop or R&B headliner, more that if social media was to be believed, a significant proportion of Glastonbury-goers had simply never heard of her.
That probably says more about the atomised nature of algorithm-catered pop culture in 2024 – a world in which it’s far easier to stay in your particular musical bubble than it once was – than it does about SZA’s popularity. Her last album SOS wasn’t just a critical success, it sold 3m copies in the US and became the longest-running No 1 album by a female artist in the 2020s: in the UK, her last tour packed out a succession of arenas, including two nights at the O2. But as anyone who was at those London shows could attest, it was largely packed out with screaming, devoted teenage girls, who aren’t Glastonbury’s main demographic. Indeed, you could interpret her appearance as Glastonbury playing a long game, sending out a signal to a new generation of potential festival-goers that they feature the kind of artists they want to see.
The crowd is definitely considerably thinner than those that gathered for Dua Lipa and Coldplay, but they’re touchingly committed. Plenty of her core audience seem to have made their way to the barriers at the front, someone has gone to the trouble of making a flag with the winning legend “Hail SZA”, while one gentleman in the middle of the audience loudly professes his love for her after, and occasionally during, most of the songs she plays.
Their devotion is entirely understandable. As R&B divas go, she’s impressively eclectic and strikingly eccentric. Her sound hops divertingly around: heavy guitars underpin F2F, Love Galore carries a distinct trace of G-funk in its DNA, Nobody Gets Me is an acoustic ballad with a chorus that keeps threatening to break into Natalie Imbruglia’s Torn. The live version of her collaboration with Doja Cat, Kiss Me More, comes interpolated with snatches of Prince’s Kiss. She has a fantastic voice, albeit one initially beset by microphone problems that leave her sounding as if someone’s locked her in a cupboard during her opening numbers.
Her show is also remarkably visually arresting. The ocean-themed aesthetic of her last tour has been replaced by a stalactite-laden underground grotto. Her performance is packed with short interstitial films featuring insects, and – at one alarming point – a creature with a compound eyes, antennae and a big bum. She variously performs astride a giant beetle, accompanied by a hybrid robot/chair – she parts its legs to give it a brief lapdance – waving swords around, and ascending a giant felled tree trunk while clad in a pair of fairy wings (on the way back down, she pauses momentarily to twerk).
The connection between the swords and the title of her biggest hit, Kill Bill, aside, what any of this is supposed to signify remains fairly enigmatic, but it would be extremely hard to feel bored while watching someone twerking in fairy wings halfway up a tree and there’s something hugely entertaining about the contrast between the mystical setting and the earthiness of her lyrics: “I only fucked him ‘cause I miss you”, “it’s shitty of you to make me feel just like this”.
She concludes with 20something, during which she causes a degree of screamy bedlam by descending to the barrier at the front of the stage. This being Glastonbury, a degree of weirdness is added by the fact that one of the fans she’s singing her heartfelt ballad of lost love and post-teenage ennui to is holding an effigy of Smithers from The Simpsons on a stick: a suitably peculiar ending to a risky, but ultimately hugely rewarding performance.