SZA review, Glastonbury 2024: a significant talent, on the wrong stage

American contemporary RnB singer SZA closed Glastonbury 2024 with one of the most spectacular sets the festival has ever witnessed, to perhaps the smallest audience I have ever seen for a Pyramid stage main headliner.

Not disastrously so, but 34-year-old singer songwriter Solana Rowe drew at very best a third of the number who turned out for Coldplay the night before.

She had astonishing production staging, a huge electro hip hop sound and fluid, personable singing but it was abundantly clear that more Glastonbury revellers favoured the shabby alt rock of The National on the Other Stage.

The truth is, there was a lot of advance scepticism about SZA’s appearance. She is a big contemporary star but only has two albums and a handful of hits. The style of her low-slung RnB is well suited to streaming but is sonically underpowered, insular headphone music relying substantially on the subtle emotional impact of her lyrical psychodramas.

She puts it over with considerably more drama and energy live. The drumming was far more jazz rocky than on record, the lead guitar way more noodly (and performed by a guitarist with almost as little clothing on as SZA and her dancers). The set was gobsmacking, shifting from a magical evocation of a giant-insect-filled fairy world to neon and digital cyberspace. But do Glastonbury audiences really care about production values?

SZA never really acknowledged being at Glastonbury, which can be an issue with American artists unaware of the festival’s legacy. This set was exactly the same as the one she played at Hyde Park in London to her own devoted audience the night before, but a festival like Glastonbury calls for a more personal touch.

There was also a lot of singing to backing track, so that on songs like I Hate U and Low, it didn’t really matter if she was on the mic or not. It’s not that SZA can’t do it – she is a soulful and artful singer, but if a (rare) dance routine was involved she didn’t even bother pretending to sing. Even on the mic, she was using some weird autotune effect that rendered the vocal thin and detached.

Having said all that, SZA is doing something in the narrative of her very psychologically and emotionally astute songs that is really connecting with the women who make up her biggest audience. Down the packed front third of the audience, enthusiasm levels were rapturously high.

The chorus line of Kill Bill with its gleefully sociopathic declaration “I might kill my ex” got the biggest response of the night, which might be a bit worrying for all the significant others who had slipped off to see The National. Acoustic ballad Nobody Gets Me had women around me in floods of tears.

SZA is a significant talent, who staged one of the most spectacular sets that the Glastonbury Festival has ever seen. Those who turned out to see her left mightily satisfied. Maybe it didn’t feel very Glastonbury, but it does beg the question what Glastonbury is, and where does it go in the future. None of which, to be fair, is SZA’s problem.