Willow Smith’s scream is a fearsome factor—a visceral, guttural wail you’d anticipate from a ’90s metallic band. You’ll be able to hear it throughout her new album, Coping Mechanism, and it comes as a shock from an artist who just lately went TikTok viral along with her neo-soul psychedelic R&B observe “Wait a Minute!” It’s additionally at odds with the 22-year-old individual sitting throughout from me on Zoom, who’s carrying a fuzzy jacket and grey hoodie atop her shaved head and feeding her rescue canine, Korn, a bone, whereas waxing poetic in regards to the intrinsic great thing about the universe.
Willow Smith, photographed in Los Angeles on November 8, 2022. Clothes by Valentino; jewellery by Jennifer Fisher. {Photograph} by Adrienne Raquel. Styled by Ronnie Hart.
“These days, I’ve simply been trying on the world and being, like, wow,” Willow says. “The unknown power that makes the ocean do its factor, that makes stars explode, that enables black holes and different cosmos to exist—it’s a stupendous factor. Despite the fact that life has a whole lot of struggling, and though there’s a whole lot of ache, there’s additionally a whole lot of magnificence.”
Willow is the one daughter of Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith, the sister of rapper and actor Jaden Smith, and an artist in her personal proper since her earworm-y pop-rap jam “Whip My Hair” went to quantity 11 on the charts only a few days after her tenth birthday. What, you could marvel, might Willow must scream about? “Oh, man,” she says with a heavy sigh. “Being born.” She leads me on a thought experiment about simply that, outlining the shocks and pressures that comply with most people on their journey from womb to tomb, starting with that first second that “somebody slaps you on the ass.” “Society,” she says, “doesn’t need you to develop into probably the most realized, distinctive model of your self.” Willow shouldn’t be asking for particular dispensation or suggesting that her personal passage has been existentially more durable than yours: “Life shouldn’t be simple for anybody. All of us have our personal stuff.” On Coping Mechanism, she’s not screaming for herself however for all of us. “It’s probably not about the place I come from,” she says. “It’s extra about simply the existential trauma of being alive generally.”
