The 2020s File Feature
Used
Used — SZA and Don Toliver in the Cold SeasonSZA released SOS in December 2022 the way a storm system arrives: with enough force to reorganize the landscape …
01 The Story
Used — SZA and Don Toliver in the Cold Season
SZA released SOS in December 2022 the way a storm system arrives: with enough force to reorganize the landscape it moves through. The album became one of the defining releases of the year's final weeks and then kept going, accumulating weeks on the charts with the kind of slow-building momentum that separates genuine cultural events from seasonal noise. Used, a collaboration with Don Toliver, was among the tracks that found a sustained audience as the album settled into the culture.
SOS and the Scale of the Moment
By late 2022, SZA had already established herself as one of R&B's most distinctive and emotionally honest voices through CTRL, her 2017 debut album. The wait for a follow-up had been long enough that SOS arrived carrying the accumulated weight of years of anticipation. The album delivered: it debuted at number 1 on the Billboard 200 and generated a record-breaking number of Hot 100 entries simultaneously, demonstrating a level of commercial engagement that few R&B albums of the era had managed. Used was part of that extraordinary wave.
Don Toliver's Contribution
Don Toliver, whose affiliation with Travis Scott's Cactus Jack label had given him a prominent platform in hip-hop and R&B spaces, brought a complementary energy to the collaboration. His vocal style, melodic and slightly hazy, meshes naturally with the emotional climate SZA creates on SOS. Their dynamic on Used has an authentic tension to it, two voices navigating the same complicated emotional situation from slightly different angles.
Chart Life and Streaming Persistence
Used debuted at number 30 on the Billboard Hot 100 on December 24, 2022, riding the extraordinary opening-week performance of the full album. The song spent six weeks on the chart, a sustained run that outlasted many of the album's other entries and reflected the specific resonance the track found with listeners during the winter months. The song's arc on the chart, debuting strong and then circling in the 70s and 80s for several weeks, tells the story of a track that had a real audience rather than simply opening-week streaming numbers.
The Sound and Its Place in SZA's Range
Used operates in the darker, more agitated corner of SOS's emotional spectrum. Where some of the album's tracks favor beauty and reflection, this one has an edge to it, a quality of frustrated desire and unresolved feeling that gives it a different kind of energy. The production supports that mood with a low-simmering intensity that keeps the track from settling into anything comfortable. With over 4 million YouTube views, it has found the audience it deserves. Press play and feel the winter cold in every bar.
“Used” — SZA Featuring Don Toliver's singular moment on the 2020s charts.
02 Song Meaning
The Meaning Behind Used — Feeling Expendable in the Architecture of Love
The title of Used lands like an accusation and a diagnosis simultaneously. SZA has built her catalog on a particular kind of emotional precision: the ability to describe the texture of bad romantic situations in language that feels lived-in rather than constructed. Used is a concentrated example of that skill, a song about the feeling of being treated as a convenience rather than a person.
The Core Emotional Argument
At the center of the song is the experience of recognizing that you have been instrumentalized, that someone has taken what they needed from a relationship without offering anything reciprocal in return. The lyrics locate this feeling in specific behavioral details rather than abstract complaint, which is what makes SZA's writing so effective. The grievance is not about love in general; it is about this particular dynamic, with its particular choreography of taking and withholding.
Don Toliver as Counterpoint
Don Toliver's presence complicates the song's emotional geometry in productive ways. Rather than simply validating SZA's perspective, his vocal contribution adds a second, slightly deflecting point of view. The tension between them on the track mimics the tension the lyrics describe: two people in the same situation assigning different weights to the same events. This dialogic structure elevates the song beyond a single-perspective complaint into something more genuinely dramatic.
Emotional Complexity and Self-Implication
Part of what distinguishes SZA's writing at her best is her willingness to implicate herself in the situations she describes. Used is not simply a portrait of a bad partner. There is a quality of self-examination running beneath the frustration, an acknowledgment that the speaker kept returning to an arrangement that was visibly unequal. This refusal to claim simple victimhood gives the song its moral complexity and makes it more honest than most breakup narratives.
Why Listeners Claimed It
The song resonated precisely because the experience it describes is so widely shared and so rarely articulated with this combination of specificity and dignity. Its six weeks on the Hot 100, sustained through the first weeks of 2023, reflected the degree to which SZA's audience recognized their own situations in what she was describing. The feeling of being used does not belong to any particular demographic or relationship structure; it is, unfortunately, close to universal. SZA writes about it without making it manageable, which is exactly the right approach.
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