More than a decade since her debut, Willow still treats genre like a suggestion. She has ricocheted from the gothic-jazz sprawl of The 1st to the piano-still R&B of Willow; she detonated into pop-punk on lately i feel EVERYTHING before softening her edges on 2024’s atmospheric empathogen. To make her self-produced seventh album, petal rock black, Willow disappeared into the studio for a year with guests like George Clinton, Kamasi Washington, Jon Batiste, and Tune-Yards, chasing something more experimental. It’s her most restless release yet, but, as ever, she sounds a little too enamored with her own ability to sprawl to find a story worth telling.
Throughout her music career, Willow Smith has struggled to outpace the “nepo baby” stamp that’s threatened to define her and her brother, Jaden. “I definitely think that a little bit of insecurity has driven me harder because people do think that the only reason I’m successful is because of my parents,” she told Allure in 2024. “That has driven me to work really hard to try to prove them wrong.” petal rock black is understated at times, but it’s also consumed by a need to prove its complexity. Her performances span guitar, piano, and drums, played in odd time signatures and strange arrangements, with an almost feverish virtuosity.
Yet in her fixation on demonstrating just how far she can bend these sounds to her will, the songs themselves begin to blur. Cramming lots of ideas into brief runtimes, ambitious songs like “vegetation,” “sitting silently,” and “nothing and everything” land as hollow exercises that are rich in atmosphere but lacking in momentum or meaning. Songs also fall victim to similar drum patterns, their hi-hats ticking with near identical restraint, so that even a warped and computerized cover of Prince’s 1984 classic “i would die 4 u” struggles to distinguish itself from neighboring tracks.
When Willow turns inward, the music steadies. The songs feel most complete when she grounds them in real experiences rather than reaching for some grand spiritual thesis. In those moments, the abstraction falls away, the melodies find somewhere to land, and her vocal performances can soar. On “omnipotent” and “holy mystery,” she straddles sexuality and spirituality with real conviction. “Lay me down on this altar of love/I am an offering,” she repeats through layered harmonies on “holy mystery.” Like Solange, Willow understands harmony as texture, how sometimes a breathy run or wordless coo can say more than any lyrics. In these stretches, Willow sounds less concerned with proving her musicianship than actually inhabiting it.
Willow is at her most magnetic when she lets the emotional pull of a song do most of the work. The second half of “ear to the cocoon” sounds feral but suggests a more disciplined album lurking beneath the surface, one shaped by deliberate compositional choices instead of endless experimentation. As the arrangement swells, her layers of vocals begin to blend together—one line scatting while another rises in a chant. The drums become more insistent, the harmonies stack higher, and suddenly all the movement has a direction. In that stretch, she stops sounding like she’s trying on as many styles as possible and starts sounding like she’s only chasing her own curiosity.
