SZA was so excited to have earned her first ever Billboard Hot 100 No. 1, she needed a whole week before she was ready to celebrate publicly.
And even though her career-defining smash “Kill Bill” has since been overtaken by Morgan Wallen’s “Last Night” in the top spot, the 33-year-old R&B/pop star still took a moment to gush about the accomplishment on Twitter. “took me a over week to process cause I dreamt of this my entire career,” she wrote in an emotional early Wednesday morning (May 3) post. “didn’t feel real lol, still doesn’t.”
“but I wanna say THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR THIS,” SZA continued. “Every person ,every fan base every ear that listened and pushed for me .”
“Can’t believe we have a number 1 record,” she added.
The milestone has been a long time coming for “Kill Bill.” Since the December 2022 release of SZA’s sophomore album, SOS, its standout track spent a total of 18 weeks charting on the Hot 100 — 17 of them in the top 10, and eight of them at No. 2 — before finally pulling ahead to first place in its 19th week, on the chart dated April 29.
Helping to give “Kill Bill” the boost it needed, Doja Cat jumped on a remix of the track released April 14. (However, Doja is not billed under the song on the Hot 100 because the remix did not account for the majority of the song’s overall consumption during the tracking week.) According to Luminate, the song drew 86.5 million radio airplay audience impressions and 28.3 million streams, and sold 5,000 downloads in the April 14-20 tracking week.
And while its prowess on the Hot 100 broke a personal record for SZA, “Kill Bill” is also breaking chart records elsewhere. In April, it became the Billboard Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart’s longest-running No. 1 by a woman in a lead role, surpassing Mary J. Blige’s previous record of 15 weeks at the top of the list.
See SZA’s belated reaction to scoring her first ever Hot 100 No. 1 below:
took me a over week to process cause I dreamt of this my entire career🥹.. didn’t feel real lol, still doesn’t. but I wanna say THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR THIS. Every person ,every fan base every ear that listened and pushed for me . Can’t believe we have a number 1 record 🩸🆘 pic.twitter.com/mpk9ZEXNpR
— SZA (@sza) May 3, 2023
