WILLOW announces her new album, lately I feel EVERYTHING out July 16th on MSFTSMusic/Roc Nation. The album is available for pre-order / pre-save today and features Travis Barker, Avril Lavigne and more. WILLOW has also released another song from the forthcoming record - “Lipstick.” “I just wanted to let loose with this album. I wanted to have fun and be young and not be so existential and worrying all the time,” says WILLOW. “Lipstick” follows the release of the explosive first single “t r a n s p a r e n t s o u l feat. Travis Barker.”
At only 20 years old, WILLOW has spent half her life in the music industry. With lately I feel EVERYTHING, a decade of growth both in the industry and as a young woman come to a head. Her new single and LP is a love letter to that constant evolution.She began working on the album in 2020, during the pandemic. With all the extra time on her hands at home, she began recording demos that she would later re-record when she felt like she could safely enter a studio. It was a new process for her, born out of caution, but it helped her capture the rawness of her new sound. On the forthcoming record, WILLOW channels the pop-punk and emo heroes she adored as a teenager, like Avril Lavigne, My Chemical Romance and Paramore. “I thought this was a really dope outlet for a new energy I wanted to bring to my music,” she says.
“t r a n s p a r e n t s o u l feat. Travis Barker” was originally unveiled via Beats1’s Zane Lowe as a New Music Daily and has since garnered both critical praise and commercial success. “Smith’s song doesn’t so much make the case for Black women in pop-punk as much as it serves as a reminder that we’ve always been here,” said Jezebel. “It’s a pop-punk banger for the ages.” WILLOW recently performed the single on The Tonight Show With Jimmy Fallon. Watch here.
Though she considers her writing process “very solitary” and “insular,” she has found a fruitful musical partnership in Tyler Cole, who she first worked with on 2019’s WILLOW. She describes the relationship she has with Cole as a great “synergy,” which has unlocked something deeper in her music as she progresses in her career.
One major influence for the record comes from a deeply personal place: her own mother Jada Pinkett Smith. These days, the two co-host the Facebook Watch talk show Red Table Talk with her grandmother Adrienne Banield-Norris. But prior to that, Pinkett had a rocker past that she fulfilled alongside her acting career. Pinkett formed the nu metal band Wicked Wisdom when her daughter was an infant. “I was always so inspired by the power of her voice,” WILLOW says. Wicked Wisdom was at their most active during her most formative years. The group has released two albums, opened for Britney Spears on her Onyx Hotel Tour in 2004 and a year later appeared at Ozzfest. While she admired her mom’s musical route, WILLOW was skeptical of her own ability to channel that rock side. “I never felt like I could sing that kind of music because I was always trained to sing R&B and pop.”
Letting go of that insecurity proved to be a breakthrough when she realized how influential R&B and pop vocalists are on her pop-punk heroes like Hayley Williams, Gerard Way and Patrick Stump. She used the soulful range of her own vocal chops to add a fresh flare to the mosh-ready records she wrote for this release and learned how to stop looking at that training