Things happened quickly for Willow, as they tend to do for children of celebrities. At 9, she scored a platinum hit and signed to Roc Nation just as the song went viral. At 10, she was cast as the lead in a movie remake of the musical Annie. Just as the Smith family career plan had seemingly taken hold, she rebuked it: She quit Annie, withdrew from the pop sphere, and started releasing music with titles like Interdimensional Tesseract. She has called having famous parents “excruciatingly terrible” and has been in overdrive forging her own path. On “Boy,” the opener to her 2017 album, The 1st, released on her 17th birthday, she was as honest about how the outside world sees her as she’s ever been, looking through the eyes of a new lover: “I come from a cluster of super bright stars/And probably to him it feels scary to reach that far,” she sang. She’s been trying to be more down to earth her whole life.
Willow, a child star turned self-professed Star Child, has had a different kind of coming-of-age Hollywood story since. She has been in a perpetually transitional state searching for her own identity, a ghost haunting the Smith family celebrity legacy. That journey has largely manifested as bohemian, third-eye musings in search of absolute truth. But, more often than not, Willow’s vision quests haven’t produced impressionable music. She sounds like if SZA suddenly retreated from the limelight, got really into Alanis Morissette and junk science, and was noncommittal about songcraft. It may be a lack of practice or it may be a lack of interest, but her brand of psychedelic soul and blurry dream-pop can be so immaterial it’s as if it’s trapped in the astral plane. Her self-titled album can be pretty in a tuned-out sort of way, if you let it wash over you like a gentle current of #vibes, but she is no closer to showing us who she really is.
Willow co-produced the album with musician Tyler Cole, half of the duo Sol Prophet, who (both solo and in tandem) makes music aimlessly searching for something, anything, to say. He is a member of the MSFTSrep “art collective” Willow founded with her brother, the now full-time inventor Jaden. Two of their previous collaborations, “Afraid” and “Sorrow,” feel like entry points into this nebulous headspace—light on music, powered mostly by hums and incantations. Both Willow and Cole would consider genre an insult. They want their music to transcend the limits of classification to a higher level of consciousness.
Willow was already getting into guitars on The 1st, but Cole’s influence is clear. He has driven her toward a more atmospheric sound. The music here is competent enough to pass for enlightened but it’s actually illusory. There is nothing tangible to latch onto. Listening closely feels like trying to identify solid objects when wandering through a fog, particularly on “Like a Bird” and “U KNOW,” which both seem to blur until they’re out of focus.
The 1st was rangier and explored who Willow was as a young woman, thinker, and artist, delving into the personal in a way she hadn’t before in her music. The songs on Willow just bleed together at the edges into a composite of wokeness. Cole tweeted that Willow was the official album of the Area 51 raid. Across its 22 minutes, Willow’s “falling into the arms of naked truth” and singing about Annunaki and sacred geometry. She still writes about love, but primarily in the philosophical sense. In the search for deeper meaning, her songs lose all sight of what’s right there on the surface. There’s a song called “Overthinking IT” where she warbles, “I know that sometimes/I’m crippled by my mind/I don’t wanna be.” It’s the realest, closest, most truthful thing she says.
On “Time Machine,” she longs to live her life out among a previous generation, so she can rub shoulders with the visionaries of the past with whom she feels kinship—predictably, Jean-Michel Basquiat in 1983 and Kurt Cobain in 1993, two of the most mainstream icons to represent artistic license among teenage misfits. She’s nostalgic for MTV. Her message—things were better any time before now—feels poorly justified and unearned. “I don’t care what anyone says/Everyone is disconnected these days/’Cause everyone is looking at their phone/Tryna feel like they are less alone/And I’m here to tell them that they’re wrong,” she sings, drawing a ham-fisted beeline from technology to despondency.
The new age tropes are exhausting, and the means of expression are narrow, but Willow is clearly striving to be something more. She is obviously both talented and ambitious but she still hasn’t translated those qualities into the caliber of music JAY-Z projected onto her all those years ago. Maybe that’s the point. Maybe, with its far-out-ness, Willow is subverting those expectations even now. But in an effort to avoid being the Willow Smith everyone seemed to think she’d become, the pop culture polyglot, Willow seems to have lost sight of what makes her interesting.
