The Devotion of Willow Smith
“Break me open, so I can keep expanding,” Willow sings in “She’s My Religion,” the opening song of her new album, “The Thread.” It could be a mission statement. Willow’s music keeps getting more singular: more complex, more ambitious, more virtuosic and further away from any neatly defined genre. With “The Thread” — her eighth solo album in 11 years, and her second album of 2026 — Willow is almost satisfied with her progress.
“I feel like I’m just now getting to the point to where I actually really like and love the music that I’m creating,” Willow Smith, 25, said in an hourlong video interview from the back seat of a car rolling through Los Angeles, her hometown.
“Before, I just felt like I was kind of stumbling in the dark,” she said. “And I still am. But now I’ve got a candle, and that candle is the technical time that I have spent with my instrument and with my voice. I just keep on adding to that little candle. But I feel like I have so much more to go.”
Willow was on her way to a recording studio to rehearse with her band, prepping for pop-up live appearances in New York City to promote “The Thread” around its July 24 release. She was wearing her own merch: a black hoodie with the album cover’s circular, cuneiform-like script.
Willow has gone above and beyond to prove herself. As the daughter of a Hollywood power couple — the rapper and actor Will Smith and the actress Jada Pinkett Smith — she grew up with many advantages. She was also, inevitably, in the public eye.
“My desire to be diligent comes from me wanting to offer something to the world if I’m going to be in this position,” she said. “Obviously I have so much privilege in this family that I’ve been born into. That is something that I cannot ignore. But the psychological effect of being in that environment is also something that I can’t ignore. As time has gone on, I have just learned to be, like, two things can be true at the same time.
“There’s the privilege that I have being born into this family. And then the other thing is the psychological and emotional impact of being born in said family — being scrutinized and analyzed.”
Mei Semones, a Brooklyn-based songwriter and guitar virtuoso who mingles jazz, bossa nova and chamber-pop, collaborated on one of Willow’s new songs, “Crush on Eternity.” In a telephone interview while on tour in Germany, Semones — far from a household name — said that Willow sought her out via Instagram and invited her to work together on a song in progress.
“I think that Willow is really humble,” Semones said. “Talking to her, she’s always, like, ‘Oh I need to practice, I need to work on this.’ From my perspective I’m like, ‘Well, you’re already really amazing.’ So it’s great for her to still have that mind-set. I feel like she is really in it for the music, and just wants to be the best musician that she can be.”
Willow has always had connections. She got movie roles as a child — as early as 2007, when she appeared alongside her father in “I Am Legend.” From 2018 to 2023, she joined her mother and her grandmother hosting “Red Table Talk,” a weekly online series for Facebook that delved into personal and social issues.
When a young Willow told her parents she wanted to go into music, they took her seriously. She had voice lessons, piano lessons and ballet training, where she heard classical music daily. She enjoyed the speed and noise of heavy metal when she traveled on tour with her mother’s hard-rock band, Wicked Wisdom, in the early 2000s. She also soaked up her father’s hip-hop and R&B along with jazz, indie-rock and more. All of it would factor into her own music.
Willow was just 9 years old when she was signed to Roc Nation, Jay-Z’s label. She reached No. 11 on Billboard’s Hot 100 with her debut single, “Whip My Hair,” a kid-friendly, self-affirming R&B song that was written for her. Soon she was playing arenas opening for Justin Bieber. Partway through the itinerary, she was exhausted. She asked to quit. But her father insisted she fulfill her contract. She did — but in an act of youthful defiance, the 11-year-old “Whip Your Hair” girl shaved her head.
Willow was determined to become a songwriter, not just a singer. At 14, she took up guitar, an instrument she has rigorously studied ever since, often practicing for hours a day. “I have learned in the last couple years that practicing is really the only thing to be doing,” she said. “The technical relationship that I have with my instrument is just going to open up so many more doors than I ever thought was possible.”
Her adult voice was emerging: a supple, wide-ranging, precisely pitched instrument that can deliver husky intimacies, translucent multi-tracked harmonies, bratty rock shouts and rapt, wordless incantations.
On her 2015 debut album, “Ardipithecus” (named after ardipithecus ramidus, an early hominid species), the 14-year-old Willow insisted, “I’m just a little girl, but I stand mighty.” The album continued the sparse experimentation of her SoundCloud tracks, but also included “Wait a Minute,” a strutting R&B tune that proclaimed, “I left my consciousness in the sixth dimension.” For that song, Spotify has tabulated nearly 1.5 billion streams.
Willow’s next albums touched down in more recognizable styles: introspective indie-rock on “The 1st” in 2017, mellow neo-soul on “Willow” in 2019 and jolting, tuneful pop-punk on “The Anxiety” (a 2020 collaboration with Tyler Cole), “Lately I Feel Everything” (2021) and “Coping Mechanism” (2022).
But Willow came fully into her own with her 2024 album, “Empathogen,” and its expanded version, “Ceremonial Contrafact (Empathogen Deluxe).”
Its songs deal with “the chaos inside,” as Willow sings in “Between I and She” — a young woman’s anxieties, frustrations, intrusive thoughts and determined efforts at accepting and reinventing herself. “I have such big feelings — can’t shut ‘em down or let ‘em out,” she belts over choppy, syncopated piano chords in the album’s climactic song, “Big Feelings.”
The instrumentation on “Empathogen,” as on Willow’s two 2026 albums, is largely acoustic and hand-played: keyboards (mostly piano), guitar, bass and drums, along with elaborately multilayered vocals. And the music bristles with dissonances, jagged melodies and odd meters, staking out a zone between indie-rock and fusion jazz with guests including Jon Batiste and St. Vincent.
“I really wanted to dig in there, and maybe find some darker harmony that could express that internal confusion that I was experiencing,” Willow said. “I wanted to go even deeper into my love of harmony and rhythm and stretch it to a place that maybe at first is a little bit jarring to the ear. And then it’s like, ‘Oh wow!’”
She added, “I really want to strike that balance. Like, how can we go to the edge while also making it something pleasing to listen to?”
February’s “Petal Rock Black” and the new “The Thread” were released just months apart but were long in the making. For “Petal Rock Black” Willow was her own studio band and producer, playing nearly all of the instruments herself and then adding selected guests: Kamasi Washington, Tune-Yards and P-Funk’s George Clinton.
The 12 songs on “Petal Rock Black” go by in 26 minutes, but Willow spent two years assembling them: creating asymmetrical riffs and stop-start beats, stacking up vocal harmonies that can sound like the Andrews Sisters or the Bulgarian State Television Female Vocal Choir. Making the album, she said, “was a huge challenge for me — just to rely on my own ideas and trust my own instincts at a way higher level. And also to get to know, what can I really do on my own? Where am I really at with my musicianship?”
Willow made “The Thread” more quickly, rejoining Chris Greatti — who was also a producer on “Coping Mechanism” and “Empathogen” — for concentrated studio sessions, a few days each month, from August through December 2025. “We both just know we’re going to make something that we love every single time we get in a studio,” Greatti said by phone from Los Angeles. “We have zero songs in the trash can. Everything we’ve made comes out and we’re obsessed with. That electric energy, it transcends genre.”
The tracks on “The Thread” are full of musicianly feats: acrobatic melodies, shifting meters, breakneck instrumental flourishes, contrapuntal vocal harmonies and sudden dynamic changes that somehow make sense.
“I don’t think it’s like, ‘How much crazy stuff can we put in?’” Greatti said. “It’s more that we try to create without limitations. So if something feels like it needs to have one less beat and it’s in 7/4 all of a sudden, then so be it.”
On “The Thread,” Willow pushes past the anxiety and confusion she used to sing about. Instead, she focuses on a subject that also runs through her previous albums: spirituality. “I went into this album wanting the official genre to be ‘devotional,’” she said. “Each and every song, I’m singing to the holy mystery and giving praise. I think most of my music is devotional, but I started out specifically with that in mind.”
The spirituality is nondenominational. For instance, “She’s My Religion” is “my love song to the cosmic mother,” Willow said. “In the modern day, I feel the patriarchal mind-set of religion has taken precedence in the forefront of society. But in almost every single culture on this Earth, going back into prehistoric times, there is this divine mother archetype.”
The “distillation” of the album’s message, Willow said, is in “The Present Moment,” which declares, “Compassion is the medicine we seek.” It’s a jazz-chorded march, with a leaping, syncopated melody and cascading intertwined vocals. Despite its intricacies, “I feel like all the songs on the album are festival bangers,” Willow said. “And that song, I really want to play it at a festival. We’re outside, and everyone can just feel like we’re all together, that sunset energy. ‘Present Moment’ is definitely, like, ‘I held onto my best friend in the crowd and cried at Willow’s show.’ That’s a dream of mine.”