The success of an album is not necessarily proof of its quality. The low economic return of a project does not necessarily mean that it has no value overall. These are the main rules on which the last years of Willow Smith’s career are based on. Just as her first ARDIPITHECUS project achieved unparalleled success for the singer, both in comparison to previous singles and her mammoth posthumous work, in an hour it was kicked by the creativity, daring, innovation and versatility of her latest and most misunderstood project: Empathogen.
Empathogen: Willow’s golden age has just begun
In 2024, after two years since her last full-length project, Willow Smith returns to the scene with a new, impressive project: Empathogen. The album distances itself from all the singer’s previous works. And the fundamental thing is not how much the result differs from past works, but rather the intentions.
The intention to create something new, unexpected and surprising, differs from the banal repetition of the four quarter-length pop chords of which contemporary music is full and overflowing. In a saturated market, Willow decided to take a competely different direction from her peers to create something unique. In fact, in Empathogen, each song has something to differentiate it not only from the rest of the record, but from the industry all together. And at the same time, it still succeeds in creating a natural flow that makes the record compact and circular.
Empathogen is an attempt at making genuine and profound art that overcomes boundaries and schemes. The LA singer never loses a chance to dare with her voice, with the rhythm, with the musical structure. In the album, Willow switches song tempos, even embracing the 7/4 that mainstream music has been avoiding for over ten years. And everything flows naturally, light and symphonic, caressing conceptual and structured music, but also embracing pop influences. In this way, Willow managed to create a project that’s inspiring for musical experts and professionals, and that also captures the attention of those curious who never had the chance to explore this jazz-experimental style. Take for example the leading single “Symptoms of Life.” The song in its incredible diversification still finds itself proposing lines and vocal choices that incorporate R&B.
Tomorrow sparks from yesterday
And Empathogen is an album that welcomes, celebrates and performs all of these things magnificently. With an entourage of jazz professionals to support Willow’s “bizarre”, extravagant and adventurous ideas, the singer is able to explore a musical universe unknown to most, mystical for a few, unexpected for us.
In a period in which music is immediate, and for this reason repetitive and somewhat predictable, Willow aims in a completely direction.
Willow creates a masterpiece that is anything but simple, immediate and above all obvious. Willow creates a work in an hour that aims to reach the listener one piece at a time, one listen at a time. To the regurgitation of the Bubblegum Pop of the masses and for the masses Willow offers a masterpiece of patience, details and meticulous angles to discover.
A return to music made to dare, to experiment, to discover new sides of it; a return to music as an end first of all to the art that it itself is; a return to the past that promises to be a breath of fresh air which, thanks to the fame that led Willow Smith to be considered merely a “nepo baby,” could soon become the solid and stable foundation for the future of mainstream music.
Musical and personal Renaissance
The LA-based musician is now at her best, emotionally and mentally. As Willow herself quotes, Empathogen is the result of a healing process. In November of last year, the singer opened up in an interview for Rolling Stone. “I was going through so much, there was so much anger and resentment, so much need to just express myself,” she said. “Those two albums [‘lately I feel EVERYTHING’ and ‘THE ANXIETY’] helped me get it out. For I was almost never sober in the studio. And for this new album, I was sober for every single recording session.”
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Date of publication: June 12th, 2024
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