‘Shirt’ Review: SZA Traces Out the Difficult Journey of Self-healing Without Missing a Beat Sean

In SZA’s newest single “Shirt,” self-awareness carries bittersweet tones as her honey-smooth voice strolls along to the song’s slow-rocking beat. She sings about longing, betrayal, and the perennial quest for self-love. In the accompanying music video, SZA expands on these themes in a Bonnie-and-Clyde storyline filled with past selves and interdimensional hauntings.

For fans of SZA, this song has been a test of patience. A snippet of it was teased in December 2020 and subsequently went viral on YouTube and TikTok. In true SZA style, the snippet was also featured in the music video of her previous single “Good Days,” but it took two years for the song to be released in its entirety.

Fortunately, it is well worth the wait. SZA’s emotional lyrics approach introspection in a way that remains cautiously optimistic without glossing over the darker sides of self-healing. Images of growth are tempered with recognitions of failure as she sings: “Broad day, sunshine, I'll find a way to fuck it up still/ Can't cry about the shit that I can't change/ Just my mind, gotta get outta here.” In the music video, this concept is conveyed by the actions SZA and her partner (played by actor Lakeith Stanfield) repeat through different lifetimes; the concept is the singer’s take on the ever-popular multiverse trope.

At its core, the song is about working through trauma and finding comfort in the difficult process of healing. Her lyrics evoke concepts of the shadow self, showing how inner darkness can become a space of freedom and acceptance: “In the dark right now / Feeling lost, but I like it / Comfort in my sins, and all about me.”

This introspection can be seen in the way she deals with sexuality. In fact, in the snippet teased in the “Good Days” video, she pole dances in a gas station, lit by the soft hues of purplish-pink neon lights. In the full song, she begins the single with a sultry, longing whisper to “Kiss me, dangerous,” but her song instead takes the focus off of her lover “you” and digs within SZA’s inner psyche. She unpacks her feelings with surprising shifts as the erotic tension of “simmer in my skin” is instead attributed to “the taste of resentment.” As she says at the start of her music video, “everything is energy.” She explores the different ways in which emotions, feelings, and even selfhoods bleed into and influence one another.

Ultimately, the central image of “Blood stain on my shirt” reflects this mixing of energies by taking on multiple interpretations. It is a symbol of inner pain, unrestrained love, or even betrayal — as depicted in the music video when her partner shoots her. Her unhurried voice threads together these many feelings in a track that remains strangely soothing despite its serious subject. The difficult and oftentimes complicated journey to self-healing finds itself mapped out in the contours of her voice: It swells, falters, wavers, and cracks, but it remains undeniably melodic, finding harmonies as it goes.