Willow Smith wants to enroll at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to study physics. She wants to learn about the “beautiful mystery” of the unseeable, she says. But all that’s apparently five years away. In the meantime, she’s written an unofficial honors thesis on a different imperceptible force: anxiety, and the sentiments that come with it. Just before the pandemic lockdown last year, she and her creative collaborator (and alleged beau) Tyler Cole rented space at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, where they locked themselves in a box for 24 hours to perform the “eight stages of anxiety.” Songs from the duo’s recent album, fittingly titled The Anxiety, played on loop. This ambitious project left unanswered questions: She and Cole scribbled “Why Are We Here?” and “What Inspires You?” onto MOCA’s walls, without an apparent reply. Willow’s fourth solo album continues to unpack her lifelong struggles with the extremes of human emotion, using a trove of pop-rock stylings from nu-metal to pop-punk to express joy and fear, pride, and paranoia. Or as the record’s title puts it, lately I feel EVERYTHING.
Willow’s pivot to snot-nosed power chords and down-tuned riffs might raise eyebrows after a three-album run of smooth R&B twinged with folksy mysticism. But her fascination with the harsher sounds of rock feels like a natural progression, one that marries her family’s musical history with her self-professed love for the genre. Willow grew up watching her mother, Jada Pinkett Smith, perform as a rare nu-metal frontwoman with her band Wicked Wisdom. She easily rattles off her musical inspirations—My Chemical Romance, Paramore, Fefe Dobson—and, perhaps because of her mother’s musical past, feels comfortable with the finer points of hard rock subgenres: She covered Wicked Wisdom for the Red Table for this past Mother’s Day, but in interviews, she’s careful to distinguish that sound from the more “youthful” bent of Zumiez rock.
On lately I feel EVERYTHING, she and her co-producer Cole expand on their capabilities as rock composers and musicians. Both are passionate guitarists, something they hinted at with bluesy riffs on previous albums. But from the opening measures of “Transparent Soul,” the guitar is paramount—it’s filtered and faded on the pummeling intro of “Gaslight,” swirling and reverberated on “naïve,” slow-burning and brassy on “Come Home” and “¡BREAKOUT!” It’s also a markedly louder backdrop for her vocals—on songs like “Gaslight” and “Lipstick,” she belts with impressive control, shouting tonelessly one moment and gliding across several notes in one syllable the next. The marriage of disparate rock subgenres works because her instrumentation shares a common early 2000s perspective: the echoing guitars on “XTRA” recall the disaffected pop-rock of Pink’s Missundaztood or early Kelly Clarkson. And in a nod to the legacy of the ribald ringleaders of Warped Tour’s past, she throws in “Fuck You,” a predictably explicit 30-second interlude, as if to show that she knows evoking this particular era of rock requires a flippant sense of humor.