lately I feel EVERYTHING

A decade after Willow Smith taught us how to whip our hair back and forth, the genre-bending artist is still just getting started. Her sound has evolved from bubblegum pop hits to alt-R&B to, now, a full pop-punk album. However, her transition into the genre shouldn’t be surprising, since rock runs in her blood: Her first introduction to the medium was from being on the road with her mother Jada Pinkett Smith’s nu-metal band Wicked Wisdom in the early 2000s. Then the multi-hyphenate talent experimented with rock-adjacent sounds on tracks like “Human Leech” from her 2017 album <i>The 1st</i>, and more prominently on her 2020 album <i>THE ANXIETY</i>. All of these moments set the groundwork for the singer’s fifth studio album.<br /> Created and recorded during quarantine, <i>lately I feel EVERYTHING</i> is an homage to the touchstones of 2000s pop-punk, such as blink-182, Avril Lavigne and Fefe Dobson. The opening track “t r a n s p a r e n t s o u l” is an upbeat, energetic, angst-ridden anthem with a mix of clean and distorted guitars backed by booming drums courtesy of blink-182’s drummer Travis Barker, who assists on two other tracks on the album. For every angsty pop-punk like “Gaslight” and “G R O W”—which features none other than Lavigne herself—there’s a heavier metal-influenced track like “Lipstick”, “don’t SAVE ME” or “Come Home”, showing WILLOW’s growth not only as a singer but as a songwriter.