Willow Smith – Power Chords

After a turbulent year for her famous family, Willow Smith pours her anger and vulnerability into a surprising new rock album

- By Chris Murphy. Photogrpahs by Adrienne Raquel

You can hear it all over her new album, Coping Mechanism, and it comes as a surprise from an artist who recently went TikTok viral with her neo-soul psychedelic R&B track “Wait a Minute!” It’s also at odds with the 22-year-old person sitting across from me on Zoom, who’s wearing a fuzzy jacket and gray hoodie atop her shaved head and feeding her rescue dog, Korn, a bone, while waxing poetic about the intrinsic beauty of the universe.

“Nowadays, I’ve just been looking at the world and being, like, wow,” Willow says. “The unknown energy that makes the ocean do its thing, that makes stars explode, that allows black holes and other cosmos to exist—it’s a beautiful thing. Even though life has a lot of suffering, and even though there’s a lot of pain, there’s also a lot of beauty.”