SZA dropped "Good Days" on Christmas Day 2020, and the timing felt almost too precise. A year that had taken so much from so many people, and here was Solána Rowe quietly releasing a four-minute prayer to herself on the one day the world was supposed to feel okay. The song took two years to finish from the moment SZA first wrote to it, and every month of that wait is audible. "Good Days" is an R&B record built from grief and stubbornness in equal measure, and it sounds exactly like both.
The instrumental started life in 2017, when LA producer Los Hendrix built a guitar loop layered with bass, using reverse effects and sped-up sounds to give it that floating, dream-logic texture. He sent it to Chicago-based producer Nascent, who added drums without crowding the ambient space. The beat then traveled to Carter Lang, who had production credits on eight of the fourteen tracks on SZA's debut album CTRL, including "Love Galore." Lang heard the beat and immediately knew where it belonged. "It instantly caught my ear," he told Billboard. "That one has a lot of melodic space." He held onto it until his birthday in late 2018, when he played it for SZA at her Malibu house. She started writing that same session. Then, for the better part of a year, the song sat.
The beat had its own complicated life during that waiting period. Los Hendrix had also pitched the foundation to other artists, who tried writing to it but lost interest. When Carter messaged Nascent that SZA had cut a verse to it, Nascent was simultaneously working with a brand new artist who wanted to use the same beat. He had to make a call. "I decided to wait," Nascent told Billboard. "With certain artists, you have to take a risk." So the production trio waited through 2019 with no major update, waited through the first half of 2020 with nothing concrete. The song was in the vault, and the vault is where songs can disappear forever.
What finally unlocked it was grief and quarantine in equal measure. By the time the pandemic arrived, SZA had almost completed the track but was struggling with the harmonies. She had also, in her own words, "genuinely lost her mind" during lockdown. She told NBC News she had lost at least three friends during quarantine, to suicide and drug overdose. Her grandmother, whom she described as her best friend, also died that year. The song she had been sitting with since 2018 suddenly had everything it needed to become what it was always supposed to be. In a YouTube comment on a fan video, she wrote that "Good Days is a mantra" and that it was about "not being sure hope is still a thing, not sure better is coming." A sliver of hope, not even a whole lot. That is the emotional register of the finished record, and it took two years of real life to get there.
For the harmonies, SZA turned to Jacob Collier, the British multi-instrumentalist she had discovered through Instagram. She sent him her demo, and he sent back vocal arrangements that resolved exactly what she had been stuck on. "I knew he could elevate it because he did that with everything," she told Billboard. "I asked him to section it, and he sent it back literally in no time." She was so excited by what came back that she immediately started teasing the song on her social media. Fans had already caught a glimpse of it in September 2020, when a snippet played at the tail end of the "Hit Different" music video, but SZA had first leaked a proper snippet on her Instagram stories on July 15, 2020, before the song was even officially cleared for release. Collier's contribution goes deeper than the chorus harmonies: the ascending tone at the very end of the song is an easter egg reference to "In Too Deep," his 2020 collaboration with Kiana Ledé. Meanwhile, Carter Lang wove retro synths underneath the track's musical embellishments, looking to the ambient worlds of Mort Garson and Brian Eno as sonic references. Mixing engineer Shawn Everett completed the picture, capturing what he described as the nostalgia he felt the moment he heard SZA's voice on the record.
Released as the lead single from SOS through Top Dawg Entertainment and RCA, "Good Days" peaked at number 9 on the Billboard Hot 100, SZA's first top-ten entry as a solo lead artist on the chart. She had previously reached the top 10 as a featured artist on "What Lovers Do" with Maroon 5 and "All the Stars" with Kendrick Lamar, but this was hers alone. The song was nominated for Best R&B Song at the 64th Grammy Awards and has since been certified 9x Platinum by the RIAA. None of that commercial math quite captures what the song actually is. "Good Days" is built around the specific texture of trying to believe in something you are not sure exists anymore. The production earns that feeling honestly: a guitar loop that sounds like memory, drums that hold without pressing, harmonies that arrive late and hold you up when you are already tired. The song took two years to finish because SZA needed two years of living to know what she was actually writing about.
