Last week, Bryson Tiller announced the European leg of his Set it Off tour featuring SZA. At first glance, two singers’ chemistry might make as much sense as sticking Chance The Rapper and J.U.S.T.I.C.E. League in a Florida timeshare to discuss SoundCloud’s business model. Bryson makes scumbag spirituals derided by critics about the women who never wanted him pre-dad hat and the baby mother he can never seem to reconcile with. It’s loved by the streaming masses, with his 2015 debut T R A P S O U L certified Platinum and over half of the first week sales for his sophomore effort True to Self coming from streaming. In contrast, SZA is the R&B black sheep of a label that houses Kendrick Lamar and ScHoolboy Q. She famously tweeted that she was quitting music last fall, with the tension between her and TDE being all too palpable for the masses. Since then, she’s finally come into her own—both commercially and creatively—with the release of her debut album Ctrl.

Despite these differences, Pen Griffey and Self/Savior Zig-Zag-Zig Allah’s latest projects have a creative synergy that points to the evolving nature of how we understand male and female narratives in R&B. Thematically, True to Self and Ctrl tell inverse stories about the perils of modern dating, the sexual tension we act upon, the crippling insecurity of exasperated partners, and the fight for control over ourselves and others.

The first full songs on True to Self and Ctrl both examine how underlying sexual chemistry perverts a platonic “brother and sister” relationship. “No Longer Friends” and “Supermodel” read as two sides of the same story:

Let’s go back to the time when your nigga used to trip

‘Bout the time we spent, girl, when we were just friends

It was all friendly on my end

Even though I look forward to seeing you again, like uh

—Bryson Tiller, “No Longer Friends”

Ooh, just get a load of them, they got chemistry

All they could say, we like brother and sister

Look so good together

Bet they fuckin' for real

And they was right

—SZA, “Supermodel”

Drake’s “Marvin’s Room” arguably taught an entire generation of singers that adding phone conversations to their songs was a novel idea. It wasn’t and isn’t, but as the spiritual successor to Take Care-era Drake, Bryson has an aesthetic to uphold. Rarely do the women on the other line get an entire song discussing the phone confessionals from their perspective. When the unnamed woman on “No Longer Friends” pleads, “Relax, yo, just chill / I love you, I’m with you / I ain’t with this nigga / You don’t think I… My best friend, he’s my brother,” the story is sifted through the unreliable narrator: Bryson.

SZA’s “Supermodel” gives a more honest point of view unshackled by Tiller’s male posturing. Confident, brazen, but with an underlying sense of hurt, SZA sings, “Why am I so easy to forget like that? It can’t be that easy for you to get like that.” Her explanation cuts deeper because it shows the pain of being tossed aside like she’s expendable. What makes the line even more revelatory is one that precedes it, “I been secretly banging your homeboy,” which puts her on equal footing with the endless flexing of male artists like Tiller. The beauty of Ctrl is how SZA constructs her story to show how her vulnerability doesn’t mean she isn’t as ruthless or cunning as the men who deceive her. At points on Ctrl, SZA’s pen is just as petty and vengeful as your latest Ty Dolla $ign or Drake song.

The pain of insecurity creates the bulk of tension and lyrical fodder that inhabits True to Self and Ctrl. On “Set It Off,” Bryson glorifies the mother of his child to an anonymous woman, while “Drew Barrymore” is about SZA being consumed with the effects of feeling like the other:

Ayy, I been out here soul searchin'

Ayy, say you still got it, girl, what makes you so certain?

Hit it, quit it, then went cold turkey

You been committed through this whole journey

Got a girl that don’t expect as much from me

That’s why she gets so much love from me

She just might be the one for me

Ain’t no need to question

—Bryson Tiller, “Set It Off”

I get so lonely, I forget what I’m worth

We get so lonely, we pretend that this works

I’m so ashamed of myself think I need therapy-y-y-y

I’m sorry I’m not more attractive

I’m sorry I’m not more ladylike

I’m sorry I don’t shave my legs at night

I’m sorry I’m not your baby mama

I’m sorry you got karma comin' to you

—SZA, “Drew Barrymore

Bryson knows how to talk about two types of women in his music: his baby mama and women that are decidedly not and forever reminded of this fact. The irony of comparing “Set It Off” and “Drew Barrymore” is that SZA encapsulates the same emotions as the woman that we can assume to be Bryson’s baby mama on “Rain Interlude.” On the latter song, the unidentified girl painfully pleads with Tiller: “For a year, all you did was lie to me and talk to other girls / And I’m still hearing it / Okay, I forgive you, let’s work with it.” The exchange makes Tiller seem emotionless on a good day and slightly sociopathic on a bad one.

Leave it to SZA to conjure the vindictive spirit of Josie Geller. The genius of “Drew Barrymore” lies in the juxtaposition of what SZA says versus what she means. The recurring phrase “I’m sorry” reads as an apology, but SZA’s delivery shapes it into something more defiant. SZA as Drew comes face-to-face with her own self doubt to stop Bryson (or any cliche rom-com jock stand-in) from wielding it against her.

“I have no control,“ SZA said about her album in an interview on Genius' video series IRL. "There is no such thing as control and I’m chasing control. I’m craving control. I’m losing control.” The theme of control—including a lack of it and wanting to exercise it over yourself and others—gives SZA’s debut its title and also plays an important role on Tiller’s album, and it’s far from the only theme the two albums share.

Both artists also use strip club and drug symbolism to express similar ideas on “Don’t Get Too High” and “Broken Clocks.”:

‘Cause you spend too much time with your friends, fuck y'all doing? Hey

Spending money on strip clubs and drugs, I knew it

Damn shawty, you know love not the same way I do it

—Bryson Tiller, “Don’t Get Too High”

Run fast from my day job

Runnin' fast from the way it was

Jump quick to a pay check

Runnin' back to the strip club

I’m never going back, never going back

No you can’t make me

—SZA, “Broken Clocks”

“Don’t Get Too High” simultaneously plays into and circumvents the classic “savior” complex of mid-to-late aughts R&B. Tiller tries to exercise control and dominance over a girl that neither needs or wants it. Lyrics like, “You make me feel how I make other bitches feel / Like you be cool without or with me here,” put Bryson squarely in the role that he spends most of his music trying to avoid: the vulnerable simp. By comparison, SZA uses “Broken Clocks” and her time as a bartender at a strip club to discuss the push/pull of economic and emotional freedom from a relationship that’s absorbing her time and energy. When SZA sings, “Talking a lot, sorry I’m faded / Think I’ve forgot you love me,” it speaks to the same uneasiness about who controls what in a relationship and how we run to substances in order to temporarily alleviate the confusion.

True to Self and Ctrl represent an amorphous and uncertain time in R&B where the curve of influence moves at a feverish frequency. The children of Drake are plentiful. The reign of Rihanna and the confidence and brashness she exudes has influenced male and female artists alike. Musically, Bryson isn’t doing anything new, but his packaging as the awkward everyman lothario gives his music a sheen that most of his peers lack. If Guardians of the Galaxy was blacker, Tiller would be Star-Lord and his man-child tendencies would be set to 112 and Tamia instead of David Bowie and The Runaways. Bryson partially succeeds because his story is so distinctly familiar. The SZA brand works in a similar way. Over the course of an album, SZA can go from owning her sexuality to speaking openly about the physical, mental, and emotional aspects of herself she struggles with most. True to Self and Ctrl are reflections of the same damaged human, and succeed by showing that neither one is above their id or the toxic ways we go about loving and hurting the ones closest to us.