Willow Smith’s scream is a fearsome thing—a visceral, guttural wail you’d expect from a ’90s metal band. You can hear it all over her new album, Coping Mechanism, and it comes as a surprise from an artist who recently went TikTok viral with her neo-soul psychedelic R&B track “Wait a Minute!” It’s also at odds with the 22-year-old person sitting across from me on Zoom, who’s wearing a fuzzy jacket and gray hoodie atop her shaved head and feeding her rescue dog, Korn, a bone, while waxing poetic about the intrinsic beauty of the universe.

“Nowadays, I’ve just been looking at the world and being, like, wow,” Willow says. “The unknown energy that makes the ocean do its thing, that makes stars explode, that allows black holes and other cosmos to exist—it’s a beautiful thing. Even though life has a lot of suffering, and even though there’s a lot of pain, there’s also a lot of beauty.”

Willow is the only daughter of Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith, the sister of rapper and actor Jaden Smith, and an artist in her own right since her earworm-y pop-rap jam “Whip My Hair” went to number 11 on the charts just a few days after her 10th birthday. What, you may wonder, could Willow have to scream about? “Oh, man,” she says with a heavy sigh. “Being born.” She leads me on a thought experiment about just that, outlining the shocks and pressures that follow most humans on their journey from womb to tomb, beginning with that first moment that “someone slaps you on the ass.” “Society,” she says, “doesn’t want you to grow into the most realized, unique version of yourself.” Willow is not asking for special dispensation or suggesting that her own passage has been existentially harder than yours: “Life is not easy for anyone. We all have our own stuff.” On Coping Mechanism, she’s not screaming for herself but for all of us. “It’s not really about where I come from,” she says. “It’s more about just the existential trauma of being alive in general.”

For Willow, that trauma has manifested itself in a lifelong struggle with anxiety. It’s so central to her being that she formed a band called The Anxiety with musician Tyler Cole in 2019. Coincidentally—or maybe, prophetically?—they dropped their debut self-titled album on March 13, 2020, the day the country’s blood pressure skyrocketed because of COVID. Two and a half years later, she’s “in a completely different space creatively” and rethinking the disorder. “Sometimes we need to sit there and be like, ‘Loneliness, okay, I see you. Anxiety, okay, I see you,’ ” she says. Now, she tells me, she knows that those specters don’t speak to the totality of who she is: “I think, in the past, I made the mistake of identifying too much with, Oh, I am an anxious person. Those are just passing phases.”

Turning difficult emotions into art is something of a family business. Willow cohosts the hit Facebook Live show Red Table Talk, where three generations of Smith women—including Jada and Jada’s mother, Adrienne Banfield Norris, affectionately referred to as Gammy—bring guests as varied as Jennette McCurdy, August Alsina, and Breonna Taylor’s mother, Tamika Palmer, to have soul-bearing conversations. It was there, in a supportive environment with her mother and grandmother, that Willow shared that she is polyamorous. “I love people, and the one thing that I want to do with the platform that I have is love people harder and harder every day,” she says of Red Table Talk. “I feel like being vulnerable is one of the first steps to opening your heart to people and letting them know that they can be vulnerable too. Because being vulnerable is power, I think.”

Willow’s family very publicly plumbed new depths of vulnerability after her father slapped Chris Rock because the comedian made a joke at her mother’s expense during the Oscars. How did they survive that difficult time? “Like I said, I love people,” Willow says carefully. “Me and my family, we are a tight-knitted group of people, and I love them…. I couldn’t be more grateful and more honored to share that with them.”

You can sense Willow’s devotion to her family even in her music. Her foray into rock feels like a direct homage to Jada, who has fronted the nu metal band Wicked Wisdom. “I would say that every woman of color who has picked up a guitar or picked up the drums or picked up the bass or started to sing or wanted to express herself through this genre of music is in a beautiful lineage,” Willow says. “We’ve been silenced for a long time, and that’s ending.” Sometimes, you need to scream to be heard.

Hair, Oscar Pallares; Makeup, Raoúl Alejandre; Manicure, Sreynin Peng. Produced on location by Petty Cash Production. For details, go to vf.com/credits.