petal rock black

The Artist

WILLOW — born Willow Camille Reign Smith — arrived in the public eye as a preteen pop phenomenon, but she has spent the better part of a decade methodically dismantling that image. Raised in Los Angeles in one of Hollywood's most recognizable families, she absorbed a remarkably wide range of influences, from trap and R&B to punk, shoegaze, and alternative rock. Her pivot toward guitar-driven music, accelerated by her friendship and creative partnership with producer and multi-instrumentalist Tyler Cole, announced a new chapter that few saw coming. lately I feel EVERYTHING (2021) marked her full arrival as a rock artist, blending pop-punk energy with emotional rawness, and positioned her as a genuine voice in a new wave of genre-blending alternative acts. petal rock black finds her pushing further inward — darker, more atmospheric, and less interested in pleasing anyone.

The Album

petal rock black was released in 2023, co-produced by WILLOW alongside Tyler Cole, and recorded with the kind of intimate, collaborative energy that has defined their working relationship. The production leans into shoegaze textures — swaths of distorted guitar, washed-out reverb, and layered vocals treated more like instruments than centerpieces. Where lately I feel EVERYTHING wore its influences loudly, this record is more interior and elliptical, favoring mood over momentum. It arrived with little commercial fanfare, which feels almost intentional — this is an album that resists easy consumption. Thematically, it moves through grief, identity dissolution, and the strange emotional space between transformation and loss.

Listen For

Shoegaze atmosphere. WILLOW and Tyler Cole drench almost every track in reverb and distortion, creating a wall-of-sound aesthetic that blurs the line between guitar, voice, and ambience. Pay attention to how the texture of the mix itself becomes an emotional carrier.

WILLOW's vocal layering. Her voice is rarely presented as a single, clean instrument here — instead, it's doubled, smeared, and buried in the mix in ways that feel deliberately disorienting. Notice the moments when a vocal line surfaces clearly and what emotional weight those moments carry.

Dynamic shifts within songs. Several tracks build through long stretches of dense noise before collapsing into something sparse and exposed. Listen for how those structural contrasts create tension and release without relying on traditional verse-chorus architecture.

A lyrical moment in "ur a stranger". This track offers some of the album's most direct and striking language around estrangement and self-loss. Pay close attention to how the emotional specificity of the words lands against the gauzy, distanced production surrounding them.

Themes of transformation and grief. Across tracks like "maybe it's my fault" and "hover like a goddess," WILLOW returns repeatedly to the pain of change — mourning a former self even while moving away from it. The tension between relief and loss gives the album much of its emotional complexity.