Willow Smith drops her debut album

Willow Smith—the mystical teenage daughter of Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith, whose 2010 single, “Whip My Hair,” went platinum right around her 10th birthday—has suddenly dropped her expansive debut full-length, titled Ardipithecus.For the past week, she’d been teasing the release date on Twitter, cryptically posting “Dec. 11th” with no explanation. Sure enough, the album, available to stream on Spotify, dropped Friday.

As the title might imply, the evolutionary album represents a significant jump, both in sound and sensibility, from Smith’s earlier music. The freewheeling, 15-track Ardipithecus (which Smith almost entirely wrote and self-produced, according to Vulture) melds hip-hop, reggae and head-bopping pop into an impressive debut—out just in time for those last-minute year-end lists. As for collaborators, Smith enlisted her pal JABS, as well as her older brother Trey, who appears on the album as AcE.
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