Willow released The Thread five months after her last album, Petal Rock Black. It’s her eighth solo record, her second this year, and easily the least hurried-sounding of the two.
This is her third project with producer Chris Greatti, after Coping Mechanism in 2022 and the Grammy-nominated Empathogen in 2024, and the partnership has clearly settled into something. Where Willow spent her twenties jumping from pop-punk to jazz-fusion to whatever came next, here she stays still long enough to actually build something. The songs breathe. Nothing is rushing to prove it can do something else.
Opener ‘She’s My Religion’ sets the terms: acoustic guitar, a choir’s sharp intake of breath, percussion that arrives like it’s making an argument rather than keeping time. Willow has said the song is for the Divine Mother archetype, and the writing backs that up, physical and demanding rather than airy: Break me open, so I can keep expanding. It’s the most grounded thing here, faith described as something with weight to it.
‘Bone Collector’ keeps that same physicality going, turning decay into something you can actually picture wearing. It’s one of the few songs on the record with a clear, single image running all the way through it, and that clarity is exactly what starts disappearing later on.
By the title track, the songwriting has drifted somewhere much vaguer: Blinded by fact and it’s so hard to see. ‘The Present Moment’ has the same problem, reaching for urgency through imagery that’s too loose to actually carry it. Both songs sound lovely. Neither one gives you anything to hold onto once they’ve finished.
That’s the trade this record makes: the more Willow lets go of the concrete, the more the songs drift out of reach along with her. For most of The Thread, staying still turns out to be the smartest move she’s made in years. It’s only when she keeps drifting past the point of stillness that the record starts to lose you.
