“Open Arms” is a song about choosing to stay available to someone even when you already know the cost. SZA spends four minutes mapping the emotional logic of anxious devotion, the kind where you keep yourself wide open not because you trust the other person but because closing down feels worse. Travis Scott is there too, assuring her it’s all worth it. The outro, a Santería praise hymn to the orisha Oshun, quietly suggests a third presence in the room: the self-love SZA is bargaining away.
It arrived as track 20 on SOS, the December 2022 album that confirmed SZA as one of the sharpest lyricists working in R&B, and it debuted at number 54 on the Billboard Hot 100. Given that SOS is a 23-track record pulling in several directions at once, “Open Arms” can get lost in the conversation around it. That’s a mistake.
The production, handled by Rob Bisel, Michael Uzowuru and Teo Halm, sets the terms immediately. Teo Halm played everything, every guitar line, keyboard texture and drum hit, and the result is unusually cohesive. The opening layers a voice memo over something that sounds like distant water, and the whole first section has a soft, almost weightless quality. There’s nothing aggressive about it. The guitar lines are calm and circular. The atmosphere keeps you at arm’s length from the drama the lyrics are actually describing, which is part of the point. The song sounds like how it feels to be at peace with a situation you absolutely shouldn’t be at peace with.
Before SZA sings a word, her late grandmother Norma Rowe does. The same voice that appeared in “Love Galore,” “Garden (Say It Like Dat)” and “20 Something” from Ctrl returns here, reminding SZA that doing your best is all anyone can ask. It reframes everything that follows. SZA isn’t writing a love song from a position of strength. She’s writing it from a position of someone who has been told, by the person she loved most, that effort counts. Whether the relationship justifies that effort is where the song lives.
The first verse is about running. The lines about never being able to stay with anyone, about coming from somewhere she needed to leave, sketch a history of disconnection before landing on the idea that this person found her anyway. The language is plain and the emotion underneath it isn’t. SZA’s phrasing starts slow and drawn-out, then about a minute in it shifts into something more rhythmic. The delivery picks up pace without breaking the mood the track establishes. It adds movement to a song that could easily feel static.
The second verse is where the lyrics hit hardest. SZA writes about choking on insecurity, about erasing self-worth to keep someone close, about pushing yourself into something smaller so the relationship can survive. The line about hating yourself to make someone stay is the emotional centre of the song and the most honest thing on it. It isn’t dramatic. She doesn’t underline it. It sits in the verse like a fact she’s already made peace with, which makes it worse.
Travis Scott’s contribution is his fourth credited collaboration with SZA, following ‘Ok Alright’ from Rodeo, ‘Love Galore’ from Ctrl, and the Game of Thrones track ‘Power Is Power.’ He also contributed background vocals to ‘Low’ on the same album. His verse here is laid-back, Auto-Tuned and devoted. He’s locked in for life, forever riding, certain about everything she’s uncertain about. The contrast is probably intentional. He also lands what might be the most quietly interesting line on the track: “Drew my favourite color, now you seein’ every shade of me,” which manages to describe intimacy without reaching for the usual vocabulary.
The problem is how he’s mixed. There’s a moment where Scott shifts into a higher-pitched, faster-paced flow and instead of cutting through, it sits tucked into the production rather than landing front and centre. Compare it to how he was used on “Love Galore,” where his presence pushed the track somewhere harder and more defined, or to how a similar vocal register works on Drake’s “Greece,” where that tone is the focus rather than an atmospheric layer. Here, he folds into the texture of the song rather than contributing a counterweight to it. The song would have been stronger with him more exposed.
The outro is the most underwritten part of “Open Arms” in terms of how it gets discussed, and the most interesting. The track closes with a percussion-led section and singing that sounds categorically different from everything before it. It is different. It’s a praise song from SZA’s Santería practice, specifically a hymn to Oshun, the orisha who governs love, including self-love and self-respect. The shift into the drum-led section doesn’t connect cleanly to what came before it, the cohesion the track maintained for most of its running time slips at the end. But the meaning of putting Oshun here, at the close of a song about self-erasure in the name of love, is not subtle. Oshun’s energy is associated with teaching people to hold themselves to a higher standard of self-care. SZA ends a song about losing yourself by invoking the figure most associated with finding yourself again.
The final lines do the same work lyrically. The outro circle around the phrase “holding me down,” carrying both meanings at once: the partner as support, and the partner as weight. SZA recognises both simultaneously, which is why she has to go. The farewell isn’t angry. It’s at-peace but heartbreaking, as one Reddit thread put it a week after SOS dropped, words that have stayed attached to the song ever since because they’re accurate.
Uzowuru is credited on Frank Ocean’s “In My Room” and Beyoncé’s “Brown Skin Girl.” His production instincts are clearly suited to music that wants to feel intimate without feeling small. “Open Arms” mostly benefits from that, though the track leaves the impression of a song that builds carefully then lets go of that control too soon. What it does before the outro, the careful emotional architecture, the lyrical specificity, the way SZA maps something as irrational as anxious love with total clarity, is some of the best work on SOS. That it doesn’t fully stick the landing doesn’t diminish the middle. It just means the song is slightly less than it could have been, which, come to think of it, is exactly what SZA is singing about.
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