"Kill Bill" is a song by American singer-songwriter SZA and the fifth single from her second studio album, SOS (2022). It is a pop and R&B murder ballad, built around a midtempo, groovy rhythm and a detuned melody. Guitars, a bassline, and a flute that was sampled from a Prophet-6 synthesizer constitute the song's production, which is influenced by the boom bap subgenre of hip hop. Mirroring the plot of the Kill Bill film duology (2003–2004) after which the song is named, the lyrics discuss a fantasy to kill an ex-boyfriend and his new girlfriend out of jealousy, and they employ humorous irony alongside violent imagery that contrasts with SZA's soft vocals. "Kill Bill" was sent to US radio on January 10, 2023, after achieving success on streaming services.
A chart-topper in several territories, "Kill Bill" was SZA's first number-one on the Billboard Global 200 and US Hot 100 charts. The song spent eight weeks at number two on the Billboard Hot 100 before an April 2023 remix featuring American rapper Doja Cat propelled the solo version to the top, tying for the second-longest time at number two before reaching number one. On US Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs, it broke the record set by Lil Nas X's "Old Town Road" (2019) for the chart's longest-running number one at 21 weeks. "Kill Bill" was one of the top 10 best-performing songs of 2023 in several countries, and according to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, it was the third best-selling single of 2023. The song has been certified diamond in the US.
"Kill Bill" was praised primarily for its songwriting; critics liked its poetic quality, diaristic honesty, and relatability despite the violent content. The original version and the remix were placed in many year-end listicles for 2023, and in February 2024, Rolling Stone placed "Kill Bill" at number 267 on their list of the 500 greatest songs of all time. The song received many industry award nominations, including three nods for the 66th Annual Grammy Awards. "Kill Bill" won Song of the Year at the 2024 iHeartRadio Music Awards, as well as Top R&B Song at the 2023 Billboard Music Awards and Video of the Year at BET Awards 2023.
A music video for the song premiered the same day as its single release. Directed by Christian Breslauer, it reimagines several scenes from the Kill Bill films, with SZA as her version of the films' protagonist and Vivica A. Fox, one of the actresses who starred in the duology, in a supporting role. SZA confronts her ex-boyfriend at the end and tears his heart out, and the outro features her suspended by a rope using the shibari technique. On the SOS Tour, where she first performed "Kill Bill", she recreated various visual elements from the film duology and the music video, such as the costume. Other live performances also involved sword props and, in some cases, choreography inspired by the Kill Bill films, featuring background dancers who participated in swordfight scenes.
Background
In 2017, SZA released her commercially successful and well-acclaimed debut studio album, Ctrl. Critics throughout the years have credited it as being innovative within the R&B genre, and for establishing her as a major figure in contemporary pop and R&B music. SZA spoke in Ctrl variously about romance, desire, and self-esteem, often in a vulnerable tone, as well as the many ways in which emotions like jealousy and intense desire can destroy them.
One of the tracks from her subsequent studio album, SOS, is "Kill Bill". It is titled after the Kill Bill films (2003–2004), a martial arts film duology that centers on Beatrix "the Bride" Kiddo and her former lover, the head of a deadly assassin group named Bill. The plot is driven by the Bride's quest for revenge after Bill tried to have her killed on the day of her wedding.
While watching the films, Bill caught SZA's attention and she was inspired to create the song based on his behavior. She described him as a character who "doesn't understand why he did what he did", adding that he was "void of emotion, but he loved the Bride so much that he couldn't stand her to be with anyone else." American Songwriter Alex Hopper, writing about how the song's lyrics reflected the films' plot, noted that jealousy was Bill's motive for the assassination attempt. In the film's Volume 2, he told the Bride that "[t]here are consequences to breaking the heart of a murdering bastard", which Hopper said was the same justification SZA uses in the song for committing murder.
Music and recording
"Kill Bill" incorporates prominent, basic eighth notes and is built around a midtempo, groovy rhythm and a detuned melody. The song has a retro, late 1990s–early 2000s sound, influenced by a subgenre of hip hop music called boom bap. Music journalists have described the song as a blend of pop, R&B, and hip hop; some observed elements of associated genres like psychedelic pop, pop-soul, and doo-wop. Will Dukes of Rolling Stone wrote the "eerie chords [exuded] modish late-Sixties cool".
"Kill Bill" was produced by Rob Bisel and Carter Lang, who wrote the song with SZA. Its creation, by SZA's account, was "super easy", and she deemed it a "one take, one night" type of song. While work on SOS had begun by 2019, "Kill Bill" was recorded in 2022 alongside a significant number of other tracks due to bursts of productivity from time pressure. Lang commented, "that's when [we] started feeling like, hey, 'We gotta do this shit like, it's been some years.' We bottled up that energy and everything was just sort of a preparation for that moment."
Production began around May 2022 when Bisel, in his Los Angeles home's Ponzu Studios, played some chords on his Prophet-6 synthesizer. With it, he used Ableton to sample the synthesizer's flute-like sound. After adding a bassline from an electric guitar tuned down an octave, Bisel was unsure where he wanted the song to go, so he sent the Ableton clip to Lang for assistance. Lang's first approach to the beat consisted of a singular rhythm, which was an electronic fusion of bouncy bass drums, Roland TR-808 snares, and 16th-note hi-hat beats. Settling on a polyrhythmic production with a swing style, he took more beats from a separate, vintage drum machine and made them twice as slow as the first approach, and he added more guitars and bass on top. The two also incorporated a choir and backing vocals into the song. Most of the final version's instruments were recorded at Lang's home studio in Chicago.
Bisel asked Punch, president of SZA's label Top Dawg Entertainment, if he could mix "Kill Bill" on his own, to which Punch agreed. To Bisel, if anyone else took the task, the sonic vision he conjured for the song would get diluted: "I really wanted to see it through all the way to the end." His mentality for the sessions, which consisted of 120 tracks, was mixing the song "as if [he] had never heard the song before", a departure from his usual approach. Since reinforcing the song's boom bap influences was his primary goal, part of the task was making the drums from the rough recordings louder.
"Kill Bill", which was under the working title "Igloo", had five or six different demos from which Bisel and Lang had to pick for SZA. When she listened to the demos one night in July 2022, she immediately gravitated towards the boom bap beat, which Bisel and Lang happened to like the most. About a week later, on July 13, SZA was alone with Bisel in the studio for recording sessions, asking him to loop the beat in the background. He left her alone in a corner to give her space to ideate. It took five to ten minutes for SZA to come up with the hook's melody and lyrics, which she wrote on her phone. Humming the melodies, she turned to Bisel to say about the lyrics, "I have an idea. This might be a little too crazy, but let me know what you think." Within one day, the entire song was finished—SZA needed only one or two takes to record the vocals.
Lyrics SZA told Glamour in 2022 that many tracks in SOS centered around themes of revenge, heartbreak, and "being pissed": "I've never raged the way that I should have. This is my villain era, and I'm very comfortable with that. It is in the way I say no[...] It's in the fucked up things that I don't apologize for." The premise of "Kill Bill" is heavily based on the Kill Bill films, a reimagining of Thurman's tale of revenge. Shaad D'Souza of The Guardian wrote that unlike the films, however, the song "provides no real emotional payoff; its narrative is a cry of pure fatalism, with no return for its narrator other than a split-second of bloodlust".
"Kill Bill" was written during one of what SZA called "palate cleanser" moments, sessions where she would quickly write full songs in between ones she took more seriously and wanted to meticulously finish. Alt URL With "Kill Bill", she wrote all of the lyrics on-the-spot in under an hour. What resulted was a song about a protagonist who goes on a quest to avenge her broken heart by murdering her ex-boyfriend for quickly moving on from their relationship. The violent lyrics are juxtaposed by SZA's soft, croon-like vocals, suggesting wholesomeness. Due to the violence, some radio stations played a censored version of "Kill Bill" with the word "kill" replaced by the sound of a slashing blade.
In the first verse, the protagonist acts analogously to Bill, resentful about the new girlfriend that her ex-boyfriend has met: "Hate to see you with some other broad, know you happy/Hate to see you happy if I'm not the one drivin'." Restraining her murderous urges, she tries to look at the situation from a rational perspective. In a Slant Magazine review, Paul Attard writes that SZA explores how intense love and intense anger towards somebody can often coexist with one another. In spite of her fury, her love for her ex-boyfriend persists. She tries to navigate her issues through consultations with a therapist, making her dryly say she is mature and mockingly congratulate herself for it.
Her therapist has advised her to seek other men, but she loves her ex-boyfriend to such a degree that she would rather still be with him than with anyone else. According to her, if she cannot have him back, then "no one should". What follows is the hook, in which she openly fantasizes about killing him and his new girlfriend. She acknowledges, self-aware, that her intrusive thoughts are unhealthy and wonders "how'd I get here?" Some critics argued that SZA amplifies the hook's unsettling nature and criminal themes using melodies evocative of lullabies. For Philippine Daily Inquirer journalist Carl Martin Agustin, the hook conjures the imagery of "the bride preparing her mark for his eternal slumber". Thurman's character manifests itself within SZA in the hook, moving the perspective away from Bill's. Despite hesitations, she begins her plans for revenge. SZA ends the hook with the line "Rather be in jail than alone."
The song's next lyrics narrate how she carefully peruses past messages with her ex-boyfriend that might implicate her in the murder. The final hook contains several line changes that mark the culmination of the violent ideations that manifested in the first hook. SZA enacts the double homicide, solidifying the song's nature as a murder ballad. Reasoning with herself, she claims what she did to her ex-boyfriend was an act of love and is not something that she regrets doing. Music journalists from Triple J and Pitchfork found this humorous; Pitchfork Julianne Escobedo Shepherd wrote: "It's so funny to imagine killing someone and his new girl and then have a fleeting second thought about it. Like, 'Maybe I shouldn't have done that. Oh well!