When SZA's colossal second album, SOS, received its nine Grammy nominations in 2023, the singer was already thinking about the record's second life. There was to be a deluxe version, she told Variety, called LANA — and to her own surprise, the planned track count was ballooning. "It's definitely turning into its own album," she said. "And I guess I could drop a new album randomly, because no one's actually expecting that from me right now. But I can't tell if now's the time to be consistent, or carefree. On the one hand it's like, 'What would Beyoncé do?,' but I am also deeply inspired by people who do whatever the f*** they want, like Frank Ocean and Andre 3000. Some of my favorite songs were the ones that I dropped on SoundCloud [early in her career], because it was so stress free."

It was Beyoncé who famously put primacy on the album as an artistic benchmark amid the shifting commercial and creative landscape of the streaming era, being stubbornly intentional about what she puts out, when and how. Those same instincts have evidently guided SZA, who so painstakingly devises her studio albums that she has released only two in the decade since signing to Top Dawg Entertainment. But on a broader level, the standing of the album as an artistic ideal for musicians has unquestionably slipped in the face of the always-on Spotify agenda. And it's that tension, perhaps, that has lately opened a door to a new mutation of the deluxe edition, one that can feel close to compulsory for a certain level of artist.

Originally a reissue format limited to coveted classic recordings, the deluxe album once signified a deep dive into a work whose distinctions over time had made its world worth probing anew. Sometimes the occasion was an anniversary, as with Thriller 25, which nearly topped the charts in 2008. Sometimes the target buyers were collectors, those archive-minded listeners with the appetite for massive box sets of demos, outtakes and other flotsam. Even as the scales shifted more toward commerce than art over the years, with less emphasis put on the original work's cultural resonance, the deluxe still made sense as a physical product: It literally was its own thing, one that could be limited to select retailers, making it a sort of memento or showpiece. The B'Day Anthology Video Album, which compiled 10 videos for songs from the 2006 Beyoncé album, was initially a Wal-Mart exclusive DVD; you had to go to a specific location, purchase it with money, and then you could actually hold it in your hands.

Without that tangibilty or critical distance, however, the format can feel more like filing an extension, the easiest way to wring every last bit of juice out of a moment. "It could be considered like an EP because there's at least five more songs," the singer Victoria Monét told Apple Music of her Jaguar II deluxe, the original having already won her Grammys for best new artist, best R&B album and best engineered album, non-classical, a few months prior. A fair question arises — why wasn't it just an EP? — but the answer feels obvious after a moment's consideration. Releasing new music as an add-on to a hit album can bring a new groundswell of interest near the end of a hype cycle, and doing so doesn't require a whole new rollout. A deluxe release lowers the stakes for that new material, insulating the artist from the damage of a potential flop, and can serve as market research to guide the direction of their next project, all while filling the streaming trough with more feed. In an age of content churn, it's a means to serve the never-ending supply chain while appearing to limit overexposure.

The recent ubiquity of this trend, in which deluxes roll out like clockwork within a year of a major release, is understandable in a playlist-centric world where the shrinking collective attention span is always narrowing windows of interest — but the deluxe-as-reboot isn't the only counter-strategy. Off-cycle mixtapes, despite their wobbly distinction in the streaming age, can alleviate some of the pressure presented by an album release (see something like J. Cole's Might Delete Later, which wore its minor-league ambitions on its sleeve). With 100 gigs for your headtop, Drake dumped a trove of data online and let fans sift through it to occupy themselves while waiting out a withering press cycle. Carly Rae Jepsen has treated B-side compiling as its own endeavor, creating album offshoots with their own stakes and creative priorities. In a similar vein, there is Charli xcx's Brat remix album, which placed every single song on the original in dialogue with famous co-stars. Brat and It's Completely Different but also Still Brat felt like an ideal execution for this kind of thing: a reimagining that riffed, playfully but purposefully, on the original's sounds and ideas, while sustaining Brat Summer well into October.

The potential for these projects to be satisfying often feels tied to how directly they feed from the initial vision. The classic deluxe, with its smattering of add-on songs and demos, is perhaps the most difficult to find meaning in: They rarely have flow, and the bonus material can feel downright disruptive to albums that were deliberately mapped out to have narrative arcs and decisive endings. The recent deluxe for BRAVADO + INTiMO, the fifth album by the Maryland rapper IDK, seeks to take on that challenge. The original was a concept album searching for balance between braggadocio and introspection, marking the Bravado songs with a (B) and the Intimo songs with an (i). The songs added to the new edition not only investigate this dualistic approach further, but test its limits. "MILES TRUMPET 2 (i)" finds the rapper in conflict with the premise of the song's numberless precursor: "I don't rеally know how to love / I'm way too young," he sings in the hook of both, before backtracking a bit on the second: "But really, you so perfect / And hurting me to be with you just might be worth it." "STiLL i (DENiM DEMO) (i)" moves dramatically along the spectrum established by "DENiM (B)"; though both are built around the same Joey Bada$$ feature, they have different beats and verses informed by the two divergent categories. With this update, IDK takes the opportunity to reestablish the parameters of a creative exercise.

Vision is also at the heart of GRIP SEQUEL, a literal continuation of the soul experimentalist serpentwithfeet's starry-eyed 2024 album, GRIP. The songs seem to roll around in the same bed, preoccupied with what he refers to, on GRIP's "Deep End," as the sixth night of a one-night stand, a lust on the brink of courtship. "Should we dismiss the feels or make a plan?" he sang then. The extended version feels a bit like being lost in a dream. When, on "Seagulls," he continues, "Our chemistry wild, why we playing around? / We been at this s*** for years, what we so afraid of now?" it feels like picking up where he left off, the anticipation accumulating in the year between drops. The sounds on both mirror one another, muted club ("Writhing in the Wind," "Damn Gloves") and amorphous R&B ("Chapter & Vers," "Hummin' "), guided by low-key drums and scintillating, translucent vocal performances. "I created GRIP SEQUEL because I had more to say," the artist wrote. "I had more questions about intimacy and this was a fun way to explore." Exploration is key here: Even the remixes come with new verses and fresh energy. You can hear an honest desire to revisit the world of the album, to leave no reserve untapped.

In the same spirit, rapper JPEGMAFIA released a "director's cut" of his last album, I LAY DOWN MY LIFE FOR YOU, a best-of pick among NPR's favorite albums of 2024 and, to me, the best album of his career. That tag is not just a bit: The deluxe literally resequences the album, inserting new songs in midstream. After calling himself "Dillion Brooks but worse" on the original opener "i scream this in the mirror before i interact with anyone," he recants on the new "Jordan Rules": "I was wrong when I said Dillon Brooks / I'm a Billy Laimbeer kind of man." An instrumental coda from "New Black History" is extended into the runway for a new song, "CULT STATUS." The sobering revelations of "either on or off the drugs" hit even harder on the heels of the added title track, a roll call of failed affairs seeking to end the cycle. These songs are not throwaways appended for convenience — some are among the best in his catalog — and their positioning makes clear a causal relationship: He couldn't reframe the older songs like this without releasing them first, without letting them sit out in the world and generating a need for this interpretation.

The course for LANA, which was finally unveiled at the end of last year, is tougher to chart. The deluxe is, as SZA intimated, its own album, with songs that have no relationship to SOS. After the 2024 release added 15 tracks to the original, an additional four were appended in January when the deluxe itself was reissued. If GRIP SEQUEL and ILDMLFY (Director's Cut) are in clear conversation with their predecessors, hoping to deepen our connection to them, LANA frequently just feels like more: Other songs were made, so why not share them? It's a tricky thing to parse, since SZA is a generational songwriter deep in her bag and LANA doesn't necessarily feel like a misfire. There's no need to reject the songs; they simply aren't essential to the lore of the release. New York magazine critic Craig Jenkins called it "a DLC pack of more stories from the same journey to self-love captured in SOS," but I'd disagree slightly. It doesn't feel like the same journey, in part because it is such a break from her usual creative mandate.

SZA's deluxe experiment prods an additional question: Is it possible for such a thing to damage the idea of an existing work? SOS is such a landmark record, distinct in its glorious messiness and oscillating nature; it's fair to have a relationship to the shape of it, to breathe with its contours as it shifts from one genre identity to the next without compromising its singular sense of expression. LANA not only changes that shape but distorts it a little: The two halves are clashing creative headspaces, mashed into a full-length so long it can hardly be considered one LP. (I can't imagine Cowboy Carter plopped on top of RENAISSANCE, each singular work vying for your attention at once.) Maybe that matters less when the system allows each individual listener to cherry-pick the songs they most enjoy and create their own personal version of an album. Even so, being shuffled through LANA's songs before settling into those of SOS can break the latter's spell a bit. The original felt like a completed thought; to circle back in this way only serves to undermine that sense of wholeness.

The consistent-versus-carefree binary that SZA laid out to Variety really does feel instructive here: How can even a diligent musician resist the freedom to tinker, let alone the industry pressure? The streaming-first economy prefers frequency to balance, and artists have astutely taken note of the resulting losses and gains. "If you want to see my personality, I'm going to rap it and you can go stream that s***," JPEG said last year in an interview with singer-songwriter Raveena, after she referred to the two of them as small-business owners. "I monetize all my problems now." (Raveena, fittingly, just released her own deluxe for last year's Where the Butterflies Go in the Rain.) Philosophically, the current deluxe model also follows the "living document" principle embraced by Kanye West with 2016's The Life of Pablo, the idea that albums exist not as singular statements but as apps. That an artist like West, who helped define the album for the 21st century, would pivot so dramatically into software updates signaled a shift in the zeitgeist. By the time Lil Uzi Vert released an entire mixtape as the deluxe to his 2020 album Eternal Atake, we were living in a new paradigm, one where a release's makeup and life cycle could be endlessly in flux. From there, it was only natural to take the streaming doctrine to its logical conclusion, an open season for any excuse to refresh and revise.

Even our most intentional artists aren't free from that logic's grasp, but the pitfalls of the current order aren't completely unavoidable. BRAVADO INTiMO…, GRIP SEQUEL and ILDMLFY (Director's Cut) each point to potential solutions, and even in LANA, you can recognize an earnest attempt to puzzle out a compromise. Wherever the responsibility lies for our current music ecosystem, if artists participate in the model as constructed — by their own design or out of obligation — the process does not have to feel mindless or spiritless. That little voice asking what Beyoncé would do hasn't been snuffed out just yet.

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