SZA may not be involved in the beef between Kendrick Lamar and Drake, but she does have a history with her friend’s rival.
The “Kill Bill” singer, 35, is set to take the stage with Lamar, 37, at the 2025 Super Bowl halftime show on Sunday, February 9, at the Caesars Superdome in New Orleans. While the pair have collaborated numerous times throughout their career, most recently on Lamar’s 2024 album, GNX, SZA has also worked with Drake, 38 — and briefly dated him.
Lamar, meanwhile, has a long history with Drake that stretches back to 2013. While the pair have traded lyrical jabs for years, their rivalry became global news in 2024 when they exchanged a series of vicious diss tracks. The battle culminated with the release of Lamar’s “Not Like Us,” in which the Pulitzer Prize winner accused Drake of pedophilia. (Drake denied the allegations in his song “The Heart Part 6.”)
Keep scrolling for a breakdown of SZA and Drake’s history:
‘Mr. Right Now’
In 2020, Drake revealed in the song “Mr. Right Now” that he and SZA had briefly dated a decade prior. “Yeah, said she wanna f— to some SZA, wait / ‘Cause I used to date SZA back in ’08,” he rapped.
SZA then confirmed via Twitter (now X) that she dated Drake but claimed he got the timeline wrong.
“So It was actually 2009 lol … in this case a year of poetic rap license mattered lol,” she wrote. “I think he jus innocently rhymed 08 w wait. Anybody who really knows me and was around during this time can confirm … it’s all love all peace.”
In another tweet, she added, “I just didn’t want anybody thinking anything underage or creepy was happening. Completely innocent. Lifetimes ago.”
Still ‘Cool’
During an interview with Audacy, SZA said that Drake gave her a heads-up before the release of “Mr. Right Now.”
“We’re cool, we’ve always been cool. It’s never been weird. It’s never come completely out of the blue,” she said in December 2022. “Anytime he’s ever mentioned me, it’s always been positive. He’s never said anything negative about me. I’m grateful for that and I think highly of him, and I think it’s really weird that as all these years went past, I am an artist now and I wasn’t then and he’s King Drake.”
She also compared the rapper to an iconic Mean Girls character, saying, “I feel like Drake has a Regina George quality to him where it’s just kind of like, ‘Have you or anyone you know been personally victimized?’ He’s like a cool kid, you know. When you’re the popular kid in school, it’s entertaining. It’s entertaining, but you sometimes are taking losses in the midst of that entertainment. The honesty, I respect that. But I definitely laughed real hard … I cackled.”
‘Slime You Out’
More than a decade after their fling, SZA and Drake collaborated for the first time on the track “Slime You Out” from his album For All the Dogs. Drake introduced SZA on the song with the lines, “And my slime right here, she got some bars for y’all n—-s / So I’ma fall back and let SZA talk her s— for a minute.”
A ‘Childish’ Romance
SZA opened up about her relationship with Drake in an interview with Rolling Stone and admitted it was never serious. “We were really young,” she said in October 2023. “It wasn’t hot and heavy or anything. It was like youth vibes. It was so childish.”
