Justin Bieber Joins SZA On Acoustic “Snooze”
A few months ago, “Kill Bill” finally elbowed its way to the top of the Hot 100, finally giving SZA her first #1 hit. Now, she’s going for another. SZA’s SOS album track “Snooze” had already been rising the charts before last month, when she came out with a video. Justin Bieber is in that video, playing one of SZA’s love interests. (Her others are Woody McClain, Young Mazino, and Benny Blanco.) This moment, “Snooze” is the #7 song in America. Now, there’s a new version of the track, and it’s got Justin Bieber singing on it.
The new “acoustic” version of “Snooze” isn’t labelled fully accurately, since there’s definitely some production in there that goes way beyond acoustic guitar. Still, it’s a stripped-down rendition of a song that already wasn’t very busy. Justin Bieber definitely still considers himself an R&B singer, and he sounds pretty good trading sleepy come-ons with SZA. It’s not a momentous reinvention of the song or anything, but it’s fine.
SZA has used this playbook before. When “Kill Bill” finally reached #1, it was partly on the strength of a remix that features Doja Cat — who, as it happens, has the #1 song in America this week. That remix wasn’t the version that reached #1, but it did help “Kill Bill” finally get over the line. If this new remix helps “Snooze” ascend to the peak, it’ll be a big career milestone for R&B legend Babyface, who co-produced the track. Babyface has a lot of #1 hits to his credit, but he hasn’t had one since Toni Braxton’s “You’re Makin’ Me High” in 1996. (Babyface also had a writing credit on Mariah Carey’s monster hit “We Belong Together” in 2005, but that was because Mariah interpolated an old hit from his band the Deele.) Listen to the acoustic “Snooze” below.
When the charts come out in a week and a half, the biggest thing standing in SZA’s way might be another acoustic R&B song. The video of Rod Wave singing an acoustic version of his song “Boyz Don’t Cry” is doing numbers, baby. SZA’s also apparently got a song with Drake coming out later today, so that’ll be a big factor, too.