SZA Cleveland Concert — Next Date & Ticket Alerts

SZA in Cleveland — FAQ

About SZA

Solana Imani Rowe was born November 8, 1989, in St. Louis, Missouri, and raised in Maplewood, New Jersey — the suburban Essex County town outside Newark where her Muslim father, a CNN executive producer, and her Christian mother, an AT&T executive, raised her through a multi-religious household that has been load-bearing across the lyrical content of every record she has made. She attended the Columbia High School in Maplewood and briefly studied marine biology at three different colleges in New Jersey before walking away from school to focus on music. The stage name SZA comes from the Supreme Mathematics alphabet — Sovereign Zig-Zag Allah — the system the Five-Percent Nation uses, and was an early flag for the spiritual-and-philosophical undertones that have run through the catalogue from See.SZA.Run forward. The 2014 EP Z, released through Top Dawg Entertainment as the first female solo signing to the TDE roster anchored by Kendrick Lamar, ScHoolboy Q, Jay Rock, and Ab-Soul, was the project that put her in the room with the GoldLink-and-TDE collaborator generation and established the warmer, indie-leaning R&B sound that would define the Ctrl-era writing. Ctrl in June 2017 was the breakthrough — debut at #3 on the Billboard 200, 'The Weekend' and 'Love Galore' as the singles that cracked Top 40 radio, five Grammy nominations on the strength of the record, and a fan reception that turned the album into one of the defining R&B records of the late 2010s. The five-year gap between Ctrl and SOS — explained in part by perfectionism, in part by label-and-management transitions, in part by the SZA-specific writing process that has been documented as cycling through hundreds of demo iterations per finished song — became its own cultural conversation, with the singles 'Hit Different' and 'Good Days' anchoring the long-tail Ctrl streaming numbers through the gap. SOS landed in December 2022, debuted at #1 on the Billboard 200, and stayed in the top spot for ten cumulative weeks across the next year — the longest #1 run by a female R&B artist in the chart's history and the longest of any R&B album since Mary J. Blige's Share My World. 'Kill Bill' became the lead single in cultural impact (eight weeks at #1 on the Billboard Global 200, the longest-running #1 of SZA's career, a Grammy win for Record of the Year), with 'Snooze', 'Nobody Gets Me', 'Good Days', and 'Shirt' rounding out the radio singles. The SOS Tour ran arena-tier routings across North America and Europe through 2023 and into 2024. The Grand National Tour — co-headlined with Kendrick Lamar in a joint billing that paired the two longest-tenured TDE flagships — scaled to stadium tier across North America, the UK, and Europe and became one of the highest-grossing co-headline routings in recent touring history. She is signed to Top Dawg Entertainment and RCA Records, manages through Punch and Terrence 'Punch' Henderson at TDE, and writes most of her own material.

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