In the video for Willow Smith’s latest single, “Grow”, the musician appears, quite literally, larger than life. Stomping through the skyscrapers of Downtown Los Angeles in neon green plaid trousers, a studded leather jacket, and a ripped-up band tee, Smith’s “punk Picasso” visuals are the perfect complement to the bold sonic pivot she took on her most recent album, Lately I Feel Everything: namely, an expression of personal development and angst wrapped up in a delightful throwback to the early-’00s pop-punk aesthetic that first inspired Smith when she discovered My Chemical Romance and Blink-182 as a young teen. “I’ve been putting work in, healing myself,” she sings. “Still got room to grow.”
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Just as striking are Smith’s collaborators on the track. There’s Blink-182 drummer Travis Barker, yes, but arguably even more thrilling is a rare appearance from Avril Lavigne. (Naturally, the Canadian musician appears in her own riff on the leather-jacket-and-plaid-trouser combo.) Who else should Smith have invited to feature than an artist whose role in bringing women to the forefront of the pop-punk movement remains historic to this day? “We’d written the song, but I felt like it wasn’t really working with just me on it,” Smith says of “Grow”. “So I was like, you know what would be so crazy? If Avril could get on this. I didn’t really think it was going to happen, but we reached out to her people, and the rest is history. She’s such a beautiful person and immediately when she got on the track, it was just right in her element. It was beautiful to hear and see.”
For Smith, however, the collaboration wasn’t just about honouring a pioneer of the movement she was paying homage to, but also the experience of growing up in the public eye that both she and Lavigne shared. “Me and Avril have been in the industry from a very young age, and I think a lot of the time when that happens, you don’t feel like you have the freedom to grow and change and make mistakes,” Smith continues. “So I wanted the song to be a testament to accepting your growth and evolution, the ups and downs and the hills and valleys all equally. It’s for everybody, obviously, not just people in the industry, but I wanted to put out that message. I feel like Avril just made that song 15 million times better, and I’m so grateful that she wanted to get on it.”
At just 20-years-old, Smith has already proven herself many times over as a master of reinvention. First, there was her ubiquitous breakout hit, “Whip My Hair”, that shot to the upper echelons of the Billboard Hot 100 when she was just 10-years-old. Five years later, she returned with her debut album, Ardipithecus, a beguiling work of experimental R&B that marked a new and more ambitious phase in her career. Two further albums, The 1st and Willow, saw her make forays into soulful pop and psych-folk respectively. But it was with the Travis Barker-featuring track “Transparent Soul” – the debut single from Lately I Feel Everything, released earlier this year – that Smith seemed to enter her most assured phase yet.
Her move into the world of pop-punk may have been fortuitously timed – since “Transparent Soul” dropped, songs like Olivia Rodrigo’s “Good 4 U” and Billie Eilish’s “Happier Than Ever” have also channeled the movement to chart-topping effect – but Smith’s interpretation comes with its own unique pedigree. “My mom and her music career was very inspiring for me to explore that part of myself,” says Smith, referring to Jada Pinkett Smith’s metal band, Wicked Wisdom, which released two albums during the 2000s, and reunited recently to perform with her daughter for an episode of Pinkett Smith’s hit online talk show Red Table Talk.
It was Pinkett Smith’s reclaiming of rock music spaces – a genre that was created by Black musicians, despite the gatekeeping that continues to this day – as a Black woman that felt especially powerful to Smith. “Watching my mom growl on stage in the face of all of these racist and sexist white men and just be so unapologetic and brave and fearless, she taught me what it means to really put your big girl pants on and to be a woman in the face of what this world has to say about us,” she reflects. “And so it really wasn’t about the music as much as it was about the activism, and the intention behind what she was doing.”
Smith’s initial experiments in the genre came partly as a result of the pandemic, and the time it afforded her and her long-time collaborator, producer Tyler Cole, to experiment with a variety of new sounds. “I mean, I wasn’t trained as a rock singer,” says Smith. “So for a very long time, I didn’t think that that was something that I could do. And so when quarantine rolled along, I kind of felt like this was the moment for me to do some exploring with what I could do with my voice and just step outside of the norm, because why not?”
Many critics have pointed to Lately I Feel Everything’s playful approach to the boundaries of the pop-punk genre, partly thanks to features from the agenda-setting, experimental rap star Tierra Whack and the Californian garage rock band Cherry Glazerr. “I definitely wanted to go for a pop-punk feeling, but I also wanted to bring in a moody, almost shoegaze feeling,” says Smith. “I wanted to put a sense of sweetness and a mystery and darkness next to that angsty sharp pop-punk sound.”
Her idiosyncratic take on ’90s and ’00s rocker style – adding a touch of mall goth here, a dash of futuristic rave-wear there – has proven equally compelling. “I keep describing it as a punk Picasso vibe,” Smith explains. “I didn’t want it to be fully punk, but I also didn’t want it to be totally strange and weird. I wanted to ride a line between something completely and utterly fantastical and also something grungy and dirty and punk.” It’s this balance of playfulness and good old-fashioned rock-star energy that Smith has also been channeling on her current tour, where she’s felt an especially powerful connection with her fans after such a long time apart. “All these beautiful, different kinds of people have been coming out and just raging,” Smith says. “It’s really just a very loving environment. And I feel like it’s reciprocated – you know, I give my heart and then they give their heart. It’s a back-and-forth.”
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Still, for Smith, the ultimate message behind “Grow” – and, of course, the Lately I Feel Everything project more generally – is as simple as it is powerful. “I just want to inspire all the little Black girls and Black boys to pick up a bass, pick up a guitar, pick up a mic, pick up the drums, do whatever, and express yourself through that medium,” Smith says, resolutely. “The world needs our voice. So we should scream very loud.”
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