Album Review: Petal Rock Black by WILLOW
On her sparest record yet, WILLOW confuses forgiveness with freedom and worship with want. Her seventh album is devotional music for people still in doubt.
A record that swaps love language for religious language every few bars should, in theory, settle on one or the other. Petal Rock Black never does, and its refusal to pick is what keeps it from curdling into wellness music or collapsing into a diary entry. George Clinton starts the title track by reciting a strange devotional poem over silence, “storm-smeared picture,” “rust be the delirious scream,” “dreams a symphony we all soar on,” his voice old and enormous and arriving from no identifiable tradition, and by the time WILLOW enters, she brings a complaint that could have been left on a voicemail: “I don’t know why I have to Be just who you want me to.” Clinton is building a cathedral. She is trying to leave a room. The distance between those two impulses covers most of what this album wants to talk about, and the fact that WILLOW never closes it is what gives the next 26 minutes their anxious, searching quality.
WILLOW spent over a year and a half making this record largely by herself, playing most of the instruments after moving sharply inward from 2024’s Empathogen and its bigger collaborative sound. The solitude saturates all 12 tracks. Arrangements stay deliberately thin, and the spiritual-jazz phrasing she’s adopted works best when it catches a person alone with a piano or a horn, trying to wrestle a feeling she can’t yet name.
The forgiveness on “Hear Me Out” starts generous and turns grudging inside a single chorus. “Wanted to forgive you” recurs until the intention rots under its own weight: “wanted to” becomes “need to,” conceding that what began as grace has curdled into a chore, and then “to forgive myself” appears halfway through a line, as if she only just caught the grudge she’s really nursing. Most songs about letting go would have stopped there, content to name the mess. WILLOW drops the Heart Sutra into the outro instead, “Gate gate pāragate pārasamgate bodhi svāhā,” a Buddhist incantation about crossing to the far shore of total liberation, and the framework of who-hurt-whom buckles under a question that dwarfs it. She doesn’t smooth the seam between personal damage and transcendent ambition, and that jagged join is the record’s bravest move.
There’s a funny thing happening on “Play” where Kamasi Washington’s saxophone walks into a song already tangling desire and worship and makes the tangle feel necessary. “Your hands are holy” and “play me a symphony” share the same breath, and Washington’s horn, carrying the gravity of jazz reverence without speaking a word, turns what could have been a love song or a hymn into both at once. The track calls out “do you even see me?” and never gets an answer, and that silence does more work than any resolution could have.
“I am enough” anchors “Not a Fantasy,” and the verses surrounding that declaration do the actual labor of specifying what she’s leaving behind: “I don’t need your vow,” the barbed “conditioned love,” and hardest of all, “I don’t need to feel/Someone under my heel/To make it all make sense,” a line that draws a clean border between self-belief and the need to dominate somebody else to get there. Most affirmation-driven songs don’t bother separating those two impulses, and the fact that WILLOW does is the sharpest writing on the album. The chorus softens into “live like the water does,” though, and the vagueness of that image undoes some of the ground the verses gained.
Covering Prince’s “I Would Die 4 U” is a genuinely wild choice for an album this inward-looking. The original needs Prince’s accumulated mythology to hold up declarations like “I’m not a woman, I’m not a man” and “I’m not human, I am love,” and WILLOW at 25 has nothing comparable to borrow against, so the lines land differently when she sings them, less messianic boast, more desperate try-on, a person reaching for an identity she isn’t sure belongs to her yet. The bridge, “All I really need is to know that you believe,” becomes the one moment on the album where she sends her need outward without hedging, and after nine tracks of asking for cover and pardon, that unguarded reach hits with the weight of someone too tired to keep protecting herself.
Merrill Garbus arrives on “Omnipotent” and does a rare thing for a guest, contributing a separate doubt instead of a complementary one. WILLOW sings “Maybe I’ll find out, maybe I won’t” with genuine patience, and Garbus bends the second verse toward a harder concession, “Looking for a truth that’s less cruel than what I see.” The two voices don’t blend or decorate each other; they occupy the same uncertainty from different positions, and the effect is closer to two people in one room, both admitting they don’t know.
The back half of Petal Rock Black thins out toward mantra and breath. “Sitting Silently” buries one real instruction inside its repetition, “Meet yourself, maybe/Meet yourself, baby,” and the conditional “maybe” keeps the line honest, a suggestion instead of a command. “Holy Mystery” repeats “Lay me down on your altar/I am an offering/I am honoring thee,” giving the song the suspended quality of a vigil held past the point of ceremony. “Nothing and Everything” pairs “You destroy it all” against “How you birth it all” in alternating verses, and then drops “From the curve of her hip to her favorite perfume” into the middle of all that cosmic writing, a flash of bodily specificity that keeps the song tethered to a body you can picture. The spoken interlude, “Living in the Heart,” catches WILLOW steadying herself mid-doubt: “I am living in my heart, and I am going to be okay” reads flat on paper, but placed after the album’s most genuinely uncertain stretch, as a person talking herself down, which is a different thing entirely from motivation.
Clinton’s imagery returns on “Ear to the Cocoon,” now in WILLOW’s mouth. “Shelter me, Mother” alternates with “Cover me, Father,” and the repetition builds until the prayer starts to sound less like devotion and more like a child pulling at a sleeve. Protect me, are you listening, protect me. The cocoon is the record’s quietest and most desperate image, a creature still becoming, asking to be kept safe during the change.
Solid (★★★½☆)
Favorite Track(s): “Hear Me Out,” “Play,” “Omnipotent”