Willow Smith spent the better part of her teen-age years trying to bypass her celebrity birthright and arrive at a higher calling. She was determined to move “freethinker and bohemian musician” above “child of Will and Jada Pinkett Smith” in her biography. “Take the money, take the fame / All I want is truth,” she sang on “8,” in 2014, before naming the transformation she was going through: “My third eye is opening.”
Now twenty, Willow has been making music for half of her life, mostly as a way to seek insights into the divine, or, as she’s put it, be in service to the life on this planet. But working with her creative partner, Tyler Cole, on a collaborative album called “The Anxiety,” in 2020, led Willow to look inward: before the pandemic, the two willingly trapped themselves inside a box at L.A.’s Museum of Contemporary Art for a twenty-four-hour performance with live and online spectators. They spent most of it acting out eight stages of anxiety—paranoia, rage, sadness, numbness, euphoria, strong interest, compassion, and acceptance—with the intent to raise awareness about mental health. The performance had the side effect of awakening something in Willow; she told The Face, “The biggest thing I’ve learned about myself since I released ‘The Anxiety’ is that I have a lot of deep-seated emotional issues that need my attention.”
Willow’s fourth solo album, “lately I feel EVERYTHING,” which was made in the wake of that realization, is her least spiritual yet most existential release. She dives into the rousing sounds of pop-punk and alternative rock to reckon with her own limitations and those that others might impose upon her. She is intent on setting herself free. Easily the best and most assured music of her career so far, the album is the first to maximize her talents, externalizing the pent-up, dialled-up angst of her adolescence. “I need you to tell me when I’m being naïve / ’Cause I know I can be,” she yowls on “naïve,” and it often sounds as if she is working through her uniquely disorienting experience—an artsy, New Age Black girl and reluctant child star born into Hollywood royalty—by deploying a tried-and-true musical style that signals the turmoil of being young and mixed up.
There is a bite to Willow’s voice as she navigates these songs about dependency, insecurity, and progress. Her sonic evolution mirrors her lyrical one: both have moved from blurry and inexpressive to bold and insistent. When she isn’t measuring the distance (“Come Home”) or time (“4ever”) in a relationship, in the album’s more understated moments, she is assessing her own behavior or straight up purging. Songs such as “Lipstick” and “don’t SAVE ME” erupt into wailing hooks that strive for release from self-doubt. Some of that doubt, Willow has confessed, came with just making this kind of album. To that end, Blink-182’s drummer, Travis Barker, who has emerged as Gen-Z’s pop-punk ambassador, appears on three songs, as if certifying Willow’s credentials. That cushion isn’t necessary. Willow has never seemed more at ease, more loose, than she does riding these unruly riffs.
This album has been characterized as a transition made out of left field, but it’s simply the latest development for an artist who has already channelled Alanis Morrisette and Tori Amos. Willow’s music had already become increasingly guitar-focussed, but on previous albums she shirked genre and the preëstablished attributes that come with classification. “I feel like in some cases genre can be helpful because it is historical,” she told Alternative Press. “Overall, I’m all for getting rid of the categories and just doing whatever you feel. But sometimes when I’m conceptualizing things, I do need to know each different kind of genre that I’m going to be nodding to—like laying out a road map that’s specifically for me.” On this album, the ghosts of pop-punk’s past inhabit her songs, imparting decades’ worth of longing. These sounds, and their history, amplify her own musings on dissent.
Willow challenges this history, too, on “lately I feel EVERYTHING.” Alternative music subcultures such as pop-punk are often disproportionately associated with whiteness, and Black performers and fans have faced intolerance in such spaces. Willow has cited her mother’s experience at OzzFest, in 2005, when she tactfully faced down racists while performing with her nu-metal band Wicked Wisdom, as a spur to move in this direction. Beyond creating the intergenerational lineage of Black mother-and-daughter rock stars, Willow expands upon a niche but growing movement that’s set on diversifying punk and other rock genres and addressing the erasure of their Black roots. In 2003, James Spooner’s documentary “Afro-Punk” explored the alienation of Black participants in these communities, and a festival series called Afropunk was later created as a sort of corrective. Willow’s music has always catered to alt-rock audiences, but now the affinity is not just pronounced but indisputable.
Compositionally, the punk style suits Willow. She is more centered than she’s ever been before in these songs, and less mystic. Her intent is explicit: to harness the charged, high-powered energy of punk to express an overflow of emotions. Her early albums, which were mostly self-written and self-produced, were crammed full of ideas, and they unravelled into a mess of sounds that were often labelled as “alternative R. & B.” In actuality, the music spanned a much broader space between hallucinatory soul and instrumental dream-pop. Her psychedelic self-titled album, from 2019, continued her pursuit of personal enlightenment, with gauzy songs that seemed to dissolve into atmosphere. Cole, who co-produced that album, returns for “lately I feel EVERYTHING,” and the two of them have a sure-footedness together. With the punk blueprint laid out in front of them, they know exactly which walls to smash.
Breaking barriers is core to the album’s objective, and Willow spends as much time imagining a way forward as she does tracing the footsteps of her predecessors. In recent interviews, she has been vocal about avoiding Black stereotypes and about taking back a guitar world dominated by white men, which makes her definitive move away from the R. & B. label and toward pop-punk feel even more purposeful. R. & B. can carry a racist connotation, pigeonholing experimental Black musicians to whom the term is meaninglessly applied. It bears the kind of burden that makes artists like Willow want to defy genre. When she sings sharply, on the album’s closer, “¡BREAKOUT!,” about pushing past what is intended for her, the result is a willful, nearly gleeful, subversion. “I don’t wanna be chained down, chained down / In my mind,” she sings, describing the psychic toll of internalizing the expectations of others. But “lately I feel EVERYTHING” finds its closure a track earlier, on “G R O W,” with Avril Lavigne, where she springs through her “growing pains,” choosing optimism and extending support to anyone who is facing similar confusion. The real antidote to feeling everything is the solace of knowing someone else already has.
