“Nobody Gets Me” feels like SZA trying to hold onto the one person who made sense of her, and realising too late that nothing else fills the gap.
Released on 9 December 2022 as track 14 on SOS, it peaked at number 10 on the Billboard Hot 100, one of eight tracks from the album to crack the top 20: impressive for something that sounds less like a radio single than a diary entry read aloud over slow, moody guitar. Carter Lang and Benny Blanco keep the production sparse throughout, close to a mid-2000s heartbreak ballad in temperament.
In a December 2022 interview with Hot 97, SZA was direct about what it is. “This particular song is a story about my ex-fiancé and how we went through all these arguments and we broke up. When we first broke up it was terrible. I just felt like I was gonna be doomed to be in hell for the rest of my life because nobody understood me the way he did, and nobody motivated me the way he did. He was just this rock in my life that just no longer exists.” Not “he left.” The language of someone removed from the world.
By the time she performed it at London’s O2 Arena in June 2023, she introduced it as being about “my other trash ex-boyfriend,” having just told the crowd a separate story about a different ex who cheated on her in that city. The bitterness and the grief landing in the same breath, in front of an arena, over a song this quiet.
It opens in the middle of an argument. The first verse drops you into the relationship mid-chaos: a vacation that became a falling-out at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, a night that was equal parts raunchy and desperate. “Hurry now, baby, stick it in / ‘Fore the memories get to kickin’ in” is panic dressed up as desire.
The chorus doesn’t offer a way out. “Nobody gets me like you / How am I supposed to let you go? / Only like myself when I’m with you.” It has a definite pull of Natalie Imbruglia’s “Torn” in its bones: that same quality of someone working through something publicly that should probably have stayed private, over a guitar figure that keeps the same slow drag from start to finish.
He proposed. She went on the road. He left. The second verse lands all of that in quick succession before hitting the part that actually stings: “If I’m real, I deserve less / If I was you, I wouldn’t take me back” followed, without pause, by “I pretend when I’m with a man, it’s you.” She’s not positioning herself as the wronged party, and the song doesn’t try to build one. That line, delivered flatly over barely-there guitar, is the most poignant on the whole track.
Nobody knows who she’s singing about, and she has never said. SZA’s romantic history is largely private: in 2020, Drake revealed on 21 Savage and Metro Boomin’s “Mr. Right Now” that he and SZA had dated, though SZA clarified it was 2009 not 2008 and the relationship was brief and innocent. There was no engagement. Scott Sasso, founder of streetwear brand 10.Deep, has also been linked to her, though again without any confirmed proposal.
SZA co-wrote the track with Rob Bisel, Carter Lang, Benny Blanco, and Robin Weisse. Blanco’s credits include Justin Bieber’s “Love Yourself” and the Shawn Mendes and Camila Cabello track “Señorita.”
Bradley J. Calder directed the music video in black and white across New York, SZA walking the streets, remembering: the monochrome is right, the song is not about what is happening now.
Most songs about a great lost love spend their time making that person sound irreplaceable. SZA barely describes him. What she describes is herself without him: what she does in his absence, the pretending, the partial responsibility she accepts for losing him, and the understanding that the touring and the career that drove him away are also who she is. He can’t be separated from any of it and neither can she.
By the end, “nobody gets me, you do” and even then, it doesn’t quite land, sounds like something she’s still trying to convince herself of.
“Nobody Gets Me” appears on SZA’s album SOS, released December 9, 2022, via Top Dawg Entertainment and RCA Records. Written by SZA, Rob Bisel, Carter Lang, Benny Blanco, and Robin Weisse. Produced by Carter Lang and Benny Blanco.
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