Hit Different
single by SZA
"Hit Different" is a single by American singer SZA featuring fellow American singer Ty Dolla Sign. The two wrote the song with Rob Bisel and producers the Neptunes. It was recorded at the home of producer DJ Khaled and released through Top Dawg Entertainment on September 4, 2020, days after SZA posted on social media suggesting that the record label had been intentionally pushing back the release date of her music. It is an R&B torch song about a dysfunctional but tempting relationship.
"Hit Different" was met with generally positive reviews from music critics, who commended the song's nostalgic musical structure and SZA's writing. "Hit Different" was included on several publications' year-end lists of the best songs of the year, including those of NPR and Consequence of Sound. The song peaked at number 29 on the Billboard Hot 100, giving SZA her highest debut on the chart, and made appearances on Australian and UK charts.
The accompanying music video, directed by SZA, shows the singer dancing in various settings, before ending with a snippet of successor single "Good Days".
Background and composition
"Hit Different" saw SZA's first release as the sole lead artist since her 2017 album Ctrl. The song came less than a month after SZA claimed in a series of tweets that Top Dawg Entertainment head Punch had been purposely delaying the release of her new music, calling their relationship "hostile" and spawning the "#FreeSZA" hashtag on Twitter.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 11, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q98873929. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2020 and 2017.
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This entry incorporates text from “Hit Different” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.