Beatrix Kiddo (codename: Black Mamba), the main character of the Kill Bill movies, finds herself at death’s door; she's betrayed by the one she loves most, only to miraculously bounce back to life—and exact a plot of merciless revenge. Toward the end of the movie, she faces off against crime boss Bill, her former love interest turned traitor who tried to kill her. Trapped in an overwhelming tug between love and hate, Beatrix ends her bloodstained journey when she finally manages to kill Bill.

After going through a breakup, singer-songwriter SZA dreams up her own Kill Bill. (Note that there was debate over how to pronounce her name—S’za? Scissor? Scissa?—but the artist said herself in an interview that it’s closest to “sizzah.”) In “Kill Bill,” a track off SOS—her first album in five years—she gives an open warning that she might kill her ex and her ex’s new girlfriend. SZA knows she might want to think twice (“I might, I might kill my ex, not the best idea”) but emotion takes precedence over reason as she suffers under the weight of a love that was brought down by the other half of the relationship. But unlike Hattori Hanzō and his katana in the Kill Bill movie, SZA is armed with soulful vocals.

The beautiful but deadly 21st-century murder ballad encapsulates the emotions SZA explores throughout SOS. Suitably, the theme of revenge is woven into the entire album. We hear it in “F2F,” with lyrics about revenge sex, and the album closer, “Forgiveless.” But it’s all a struggle to try and break free from the sense of isolation that follows a breakup—an endless cycle of acknowledgement and second-guessing. You pick up nothing but sadness in songs where she tries to accept the fact that her ex is gone (“Gone Girl”) or where she’s determined not to lose what’s left of herself (“Good Days”).

SZA’s vivid descriptions of how it feels having dealt with such a lonely, chaotic breakup are direct at times and metaphorical at others. She is, without a doubt, an outstanding lyricist. While the lyrics tell a story of isolation and revenge, the production is one of daring new attempts. SZA moves between R&B, rap, pop, electronic and pop funk as she makes emotional leaps between feelings of sadness, joy, pain and recovery in the face of a cruel love. Most notably, the parts of the album that lean most heavily into pop test the listener. Why did SZA suddenly come to embrace a pop sound? There must be more than a few people curious as to why, given that she’s on her way to become a major modern icon of R&B/soul. By the middle of the album, her sound deviates from the path of Black music. “Ghost in the Machine,” a collaboration with singer-songwriter Phoebe Bridgers, for example, is an alternative pop number, combining a mellow melody coming from a digitally filtered harp, the subtle reverb of a sweet synth and plenty of glitches. “F2F,” too, starts out as folk pop and reveals its true, pop funk colors in the chorus. That’s followed by “Nobody Gets Me,” a country pop song that sounds like it was plucked right out of Nashville, as well as “Special,” whose strums of the acoustic guitar and melody made of chimes is, as pointed out by some media outlets, reminiscent of the Radiohead classic “Creep” (in acoustic form, at least!).

At this point, we need to turn the question above on its head. We need to be asking it to ourselves, not to SZA, and the question isn’t why she suddenly came to embrace pop but rather why we think she would limit herself to R&B/soul. In fact, SZA even expressed how bad she feels being defined as an R&B artist in a cover story for Consequence back in December: “I’m so tired of being pegged as [an] R&B artist. I feel like that’s super disrespectful.” Today, the correlation between an artist’s race and their genre has largely faded. Plus it’s no longer unusual to come across music that isn’t easily categorized into any particular genre. And that’s something we can expect even more of in the future.

We could say, then, that this mixing and matching of unexpected genres from SZA isn’t just her “SOS period” but a symbolic moment for her career as a whole. She not only overcomes the biased and blatantly stifling attempts by the public to categorize her work—she crumbles it to bits with finesse. As she says, “I love making Black music, period. Black music doesn’t have to just be R&B.”

The genres that represent the largest share of the album are Black music, from vengeful rap over lo-fi beats and pitched-up chipmunk soul vocal samples (“Smoking on my Ex Pack”), to alternately gritty and dreamy instrumentation and vocals on the boundary between rapping and singing (“Used”), to hip hop soul rounded out with a rare freestyle from Wu-Tang Clan’s Ol’ Dirty Bastard dug up from an old documentary (“Forgiveless”). Then there’s “Kill Bill,” the fifth single released for the album, with its expert blend of pop and R&B. Propped up by meandering electric bass, synths in tune with the singer’s confused thoughts and a laid-back groove, the track finds middle ground between R&B and psychedelic pop. The harmony between the beautiful melody and synth is an emotional roller coaster all by itself.