WILLOW released her new album The Thread on Friday, July 24. This is her ninth album, released through Three Six Zero Recordings, a joint venture between Three Six Zero and Sony Music.

Willow Smith, under the artistic alias WILLOW, has been releasing experimental and cutting-edge R&B since 2015, after first starting to release music in 2010. The Thread continues WILLOW’s ventures into unknown genres, blending diverse inspirations like Celtic music, folk, alternative, jazz, R&B, and prog-rock vocals and arrangements to create some super-exciting hybrid pop. Magdalena Bay and Hiatus Kaiyote are two similar groups.

She’s My Religion, the opening track and one of the lead-up singles, is refreshing, defiant, and powerful, with Smith’s belting and precisely enunciated vocals piercing through the track. The Thread follows a similar direction, mixing R&B and prog-rock vocals while adding a dynamic blend of ad-libs and beautifully arranged polyphonic and parallel voices. On this song, her tone changes even from word to word, and she employs vocal flipping similar to The Cranberries and Caroline Polachek.

Unconditional is deeply linked to prog-rock arrangements, sounding very similar to Yes’ complexly harmonized rock ballads, loaded with key changes and chromatic vocal and instrumental melodic runs. This comes across through the production and instrumentation as well, featuring lightning-fast classical guitar riffs and heavily chorused vocals.

Meanwhile, Talk on the Hill leans even further into rock with its layered wall-of-guitars sound, and the touches of flanging used throughout add more fun to the intros and outros. At its core, though, is pop, carried by WILLOW’s upbeat vocals and bass guitar.

Hell to Pay bursts into nu-metal and Midwest emo vocals and chords over folk-Americana instrumentation at breakneck speed, heavily contrasting with the following track, Shrink to Fantasy. Shrink to Fantasy sits inside the same R&B space as Hiatus Kaiyote’s Building a Ladder, starting quietly over Rhodes and jazz percussion before building in complexity and adding beautifully dizzying doubles and vocal runs. By the second half of the song, it has reached the heights of Magdalena Bay’s synth-, bass-, and percussion-heavy bridges, now with WILLOW’s personal twists.

Crush on Eternity, featuring Mei Semones, is math rock in a way similar to Unconditional, with soft jazz vocals mixed with emo vocals. Thematically, the track acts as a thesis for the album, poetically talking about love, gravity, the universe, and the infinite.

Tall Baby brings up interesting themes in its lyrics, talking about the struggle of growing up and facing increasing expectations as one ages while still not feeling ready to fully face the world. Smith’s vocals sound like a harsher and rawer version of Florence and the Machine’s textured and bendy indie folk-pop runs.

The Present Moment continues with interesting modern R&B phrasing over WILLOW’s signature folk-jazz technique and math-rock structure, and there are some beautiful moments of African-diaspora-influenced percussion.

The Bone Collector‘s rambling keyboard lines sound like the nu-jazz pieces on an Ezra Collective or Nubian Twist record. Although it shares qualities with the rest of the album, this track proves just how good WILLOW is at fusing such contrasting genres, to the point that I genuinely wish the album could go on forever.

Every song is so carefully crafted, and although the formula for each one may seem similar, it is a truly engaging, exhilarating, and uplifting listening experience. Eternity is, in fact, a theme that runs throughout the album, from the circle on the cover to the pieces that blend so well sonically. You can loop the album from the end back to the beginning, and it plays beautifully.

Blog Date: Jul 30, 2026