Smith, 17, is the daughter of rapper Will Smith and actress Jada Pinkett-Smith, and released her first single, ‘Whip My Hair’, when she was 10. 

Speaking to the zine Girl Gaze, the young star revealed that she struggled with the attention on her adolescence.

“I’m going to be completely and utterly honest, it’s absolutely terrible,” she said.

“Growing up and trying to figure out your life… while people feel like they have some sort of entitlement to know what’s going on, is absolutely, excruciatingly terrible— and the only way to get over it, is to go into it.”

She continued: “You can’t change your face. You can’t change your parents. You can’t change any of those things. So I feel like most kids like me end up going down a spiral of depression, and the world is sitting there looking at them through their phones; laughing and making jokes and making memes at the crippling effect that this lifestyle has on the psyche.” 

On her decision to enter the music industry at such a young age, Smith added: “When you’re born into it, there are two choices that you have; I’m either going to try to go into it completely and help from the inside, or… no one is going to know where I am… and I’m really going to take myself completely out of the eye of society. There’s really no in-between.”

In April it was revealed that Willow and her brother, Jaden, were working on music together as part of a new “rock band”, together with Jaden’s girlfriend Odessa Adlon. 

The news came prior to the release of Jaden’s new album, ‘Syre’. Read the NME review here.

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