Childstar was Grace’s second full album, released almost seven and a half years after
Just The Beginning and six years after her last EP,
Letters Vol. 1. In an
Interview with Papermag, Grace called the album her “real debut''.
In a release mail sent out to fans, Grace wrote:
''I felt for a long time I was a walking shadow of myself. I felt stolen. My name, my face, my body. While writing CHILDSTAR, I realised I have something no one can take away, and that’s my story. This album gifted me something I’m eternally grateful for, and that’s my power. To you reading, thank you endlessly for listening. I hope this album grants you a gift as it did to me. You are not alone. Thank you.''
In interviews, Grace explained her intentions with the album
Grace explained that the album would be
''heavy'' but an accurate look at what she’s going through at the moment.
''There isn’t really a resolution to the album because it is a freeze in time of what I’m mentally going through right now. … I thought that that is impactful and artistic because it is so real, and it is kind of dark, but reality doesn’t have a resolution. … Sometimes you go through things and there is no grand meaning or lesson that you got from it. You just went through it and now you got to just carry that with you.''(
Hollywood Reporter Sep 27, 2024)
''With this album, it's the first time since I was a little girl that I got back to that beating heart. This is a vulnerable release for me. … I had no direction. I had no concept. I just felt like I was writing from a real place. …I felt like I was slowly collecting this gunk that was crusting over and crusting over. Crafting each song was a way of scraping off that gunk one layer at a time. When I finally did it, I was like, 'Oh, that's not too bad. It actually sounds pretty good. So I kind of was just like, 'How deep can I go?'''… >''It's a very secretive, personal side of someone that's jarring to see. …That's normally something that you might not even see in a partner for a year or two—someone baring their soul.''(
''Who What Wear'')
I think everything just happens with time. You get older, you toughen your skin, you get more experienced, smarter, more confident. I feel like those are all the things you need to believe in yourself enough for a project like this. Also, it’s a brave project, it’s weird, and it’s not going to speak to everyone. I feel like you need to be in a place where you are really, really genuinely OK with that to be able to start making weird projects. You really have to let that ego die of [thinking] people are going to say this is weird and cringe. I need to just be happy that I made it. Otherwise, you’re never going to make it, because you’re going to be thinking what’s cool or what will resonate. (
Hollywood Reporter)
“I feel attached to this project more than anything. It's the best work I've ever done in my life. People ask me what my next album is like, and I'd just say it's a lot of meaningful production. The sounds are extremely intentional, and everything you're hearing, I chose myself. I had so many complex feelings about becoming a young woman, and I'm very inspired by the future me, what my experience has been, and also some feminist theory. Everyone's like, ''fuck the patriarchy,'' but it's so much deeper than that. Patriarchy is within the core of who you are, and there's a sense of resentment in finding out half of your core isn't yours. 'That's just a shocking feeling as a young woman. I wanted to capture the nuance of that.'' (
Interview with L'Oficielle USA November 2024)
“I think that womanhood is a construct,'' she explains. “I don’t think that it has a strict definition. The idea of the split between girlhood and womanhood is propaganda created to give permission to people to dehumanize women… womanhood is being aware of the pain and weirdness of the world.'' (
Euphoria Magazine)
In an Interview with Apple Music, Grace was asked: ‘Does it feel scary at times, knowing that you are putting it all out there?’ Grace: ''No, I have been through so much, but it also granted me invincibility. There is so much hate and meme culture, and [said ironically] it’s such a time to be alive. This is the social culture I have been in since I was 12-13 years old. And there is inexplainable pain that has come from that and from trying to grow and evolve with all of that commentary circulating about you. But then sometimes I meet someone, and there is a moment where I see they are so afraid because they have so much to lose. I feel like a lot of people are always filming themselves in their minds. We have started to behave as if we are being filmed at all times. And since I have already been through that – so many people’s biggest fear – being viral, being so hated has granted me so much invincibility because I have already passed that threshold.'' (
Apple Music interview with Travis Mills , posted online on October 16, 2024)
Title and theme of the album
''It’s named Childstar because I thought that was really polarizing striking title.'' (
Interview with Zach Sang, published April 9, 2025)
''I was just a kid—a little girl—with a lot of weight on her shoulders and being told 'You're so strong' instead of 'Let us take that.'' (
Who What Wear (Dec 18, 2024))
''Childstar is obviously a very striking title, and that was intentional. The album does have some theatrics, which will all make sense very soon. In a real sense, it’s about being a golden child and having to be super ''mature and strong. For a lot of kids, there really isn't space for their experience and pain. I grew up in a household where lots of people were going through their own shit, and that's where the stardom comes into play. I always felt incredibly guilty and like I had to swallow anything I was feeling, because who the hell am I to take up space when I won the lottery, basically?
It's weird because it's so niche what I went through, but kids are kids. A lot of the things I struggled with are really, on some scale or another, what a lot of people went through. There’s the validation theme, and then what really had to do with fame was my relationship with my sexuality and being sexualized as a young girl. I tie that to my fame because, obviously, I'm a young girl getting posted on the internet, but I think it’s something all girls face — the way the world almost sees this death in you. You are now a separate entity, and you’re reborn, and that's scary as fuck. I don't want to leave that girl behind because I'm still her.
In an interview with Zach Sang, Grace elaborated on the “Golden child'' trope:
''… you get reaffirmed for these qualities you think make you special: I am so mature, I am so strong, this is what makes me a special child, I don’t cry, I can handle heavy topics, mom and dad comes to me and talk to me like an adult, that makes me special. It’s that exchange of weight and power, and you end up being robbed of a weakness, that is really important to have in development. You start growing up and you realize that there are places you left too soon that you needed, and then you feel that loss, and you can’t go back and redo it. I left it so soon because I was so excited to beat the race [To be like an adult and have your voice heard] but then there is no trophy, you are just there, and there is nothing to go back to. And then you realize that it’s a false race, there is no race, the is no finish line.
[Why child stars are often seen as frozen in time]:
''I think a lot of it is the Madonna and the whore complex. People can’t accept the bridge between girlhood and womanhood, there is a separation. And there has to be a separation because how can I sexualize you and see you as an object, if you are this girl that I knew, and respect. People tend to see children sort of like magic on earth. It’s this unreachable sense of ultimate happiness. People need something to miss, and symbols can’t grow. And now you represent all the things that I didn’t want to see in you. Reality and adulthood and tribulations and all the things I can relate to, but I look for this child as an angel of man.'' (
Interview with Zach Sang, published April 9, 2025)
[About being sexualized as a young girl]:
''It is a really nuanced topic, which is part of the pain of it. People gloss over the guilt and self-blaming that can happen, and that’s a huge part of the experience that I see very little representation of in the music world. It was really bothering me, and I knew it was something I wanted to write about. For so long, I filed down my expression and my sexuality in a lot of ways. I felt like I was deserving of the harassment or pain I would endure. I had this deep-rooted guilt. So I do think there’s a liberating element to the album, where it’s like, if I want to be fun and stupid, I'm going to be fun and stupid. If I want to be sexy, fuck you, I'm going to be sexy.'' (
Nylon Magazine March 21, 2025)
“Gratitude and being humble, was really confusing as a child, because I felt so much guilt and burden, I felt like these amazing things had happened but at the same time terrible things were happening, in my personal life, terrible. I felt it was my duty to be grateful and not to feel any of the bad things that were going wrong. It was a really strange feeling. I think its something a lot of women experience, even as adults, to stay pleasant and smile, and fight your natural instincts. You want to tell people around you – I need help, I need to survive, and it’s very unnatural to swallow that down, and smile, and say – I’m really happy to be here.
Making this album made me realize that I have carried this with me for quite some time, these feelings, and this story, and my strongest battle was to deal with it, I felt like it was this rock in me that I carried absolutely everywhere, in bad times, happy times, it was always there. I wrote this album, and it really made me realize that the root of that wound was the secrecy of it, that fact that I never spoke about, and I never told anyone. Writing it out gave me freedom, and made me realize, oh my gosh, that was such a huge part of it, and I didn’t even know.
A lot of people with interrupted childhoods had to take on a more adult role. I think that you can feel this unfinished business, a lot of people can carry that child trapped in purgatory with them. And to be able to do this music, and make it right, that has been a send of for me, that little girl deserves her story to be told right. (
NPR Interview May 3, 2025)
It all kicked of with ‘What’s Left Of Me'
In an
interview with ABC Newsline, (Sep 24, 2024) ,Grace said that 'What’s Left of Me' was the first song she wrote for the album after she left Columbia, when she was in between labels.
''I wrote ‘What’s Left of Me’ and thought – oh, I am writing really, really well, let’s write an album. Do the thing like it’s supposed to be done. And then conceptually, it started evolving, and I was like – ooohh, this should be a thing''…''And it actually kicked off this whole album''. “I called my manager – and I had just hired him – and said, ‘I just wrote this song, I think that I am writing the best I have ever written, I am going to write an album. We are going to let my old label have all my music, and we are going to do this the right way, I am going to write an album, I know I can do it.’''
“It was really intentional [to release 'What’s Left of Me' as one of the first singles]. When I came to Pulse Records with an album, a world, and a concept, we were just like, How can I lead people into this in a way that I feel most comfortable and confident in? I don’t want the project to be shock value, and I don’t want it to be discredited as that. It was really important for us to slowly integrate my new project into the music that people know and what I do.'' (
Hollywood Reporter Sep 27, 2024)
The writing process
In an IG Live in
March 2025, Grace told that
''I wrote and created this album in the span of 8 months. We created the entire album – visuals, everything. ''
Grace told Nylon Magazine that
''The Album] happened organically. I'm still really young, but I've never been able to set my sights on a vibe or concept before I've made it. I've always had to obey the creativity monster of following wherever the song is going. As I was writing, I started noticing, ''Wow, I'm writing about a lot of similar topics.'' And then it became this project. It was some spiritual shit. The album runs the course of a birth to a death.'' She told
Billboard (March 21, 2025) that
“I did whatever I wanted, and made something I was proud of. I wrote the album stupid quick. That was unexpected, but I was at a point where, due to some trauma development, all of this shitt about my childhood started spilling out. It’s what my subconscious was doing, but I wasn’t mad at it. I thought it was raw and vulnerable, so I leaned into it.''
''The album is very rich in writing. I wanted to produce the songs around the writing. Some of them are more abstract in that way. I love Frank Ocean and his production style. I feel like he wrote it first, and then put emphasis from the words into the music. But some of the songs on the album are more like funzie – and some are more like artistic and weird, and some you can sing in the car – there is a good balance. The album turned out better than I could ever have imagined. It ended up being way more conceptual – it was way bigger than I was expecting, and I began to lean into what was naturally happening there, because this is really abstract and cool.'' (
Interview on Audacity (Radio)October 15, 2024)
In
an interview with Teen Vogue (April 8, 2025), Grace talked about the personal aspects the album and the writing process:
''I thought that I was going to get messed up, working on Child Star. Because my whole life, I've avoided thinking about it for so long. I was like, dude, if I have a panic attack and am rocking myself to sleep by thinking about things like this one night every six months, how am I going to delve into these memories and write a whole album? I am going to be so messed up. But I actually felt so much better, and I never thought that would happen.
Then I made this album, and I realized, more than pain, I just was dragging this little girl everywhere I went, a little girl that just felt really unheard. It was more than pain. It was locking that door and crying in silence, or feeling overwhelmed and not being able to tell anyone. The idea that I need to be sad because that's the justice that I give to that little girl, I learned it's not that, it's not sadness or isolation. This is the largest act of service or justice I could ever do for her, is to open that door and just let it out. I finally felt good after that.
At the end, I’m experiencing a symbolic death, carried out by dancers. I wrote the story of the play, and I liked the story telling archetype of the progression of a birth to a death. It symbolized how the public and society in general takes everything girls have and their youth, and then when they don't have anything left to give, they're dead to them and seen as a used product and discarded away.
I think that the best service that I can do for my younger self is just continuing to try to make people as mad as possible. If people are getting mad, it's a pretty good sign because it's like, ''Why is my product misbehaving? I didn't order it like that.'' That's satisfying to me. I'm probably just going to continue to try to do that and continue to talk about things that men don't want to talk about.''
Grace elaborated further on the writing process in an interview with Travis Mills on Apple Music:
''I am a fan of ‘worlds’. I love visuals, I love music videos, I love lyrics. These are all components that are very personal to me; all of it is coming from me. I am also not in touch with myself well, so things tend to develop in front of me. It must be coming from my subconscious, and then I consciously follow it from there. So, I did not come up with the concept for the album first. The music started doing it, and it started revealing itself to me, and I was like – Oh shit! This is this: I know the name, and I know what it looks like, but I am not coming up with this. It is being implanted in my brain, like Frankenstein, and I made it come alive, and now it’s telling me what it should be.''
''I remember when I first started writing in studios. I would write silently in the corner, I would not brainstorm openly at all. I had so much embarrassment about it; I was like – you’re going to sound dumb! And then you start getting desensitized to it, doing it so often. I felt like the last step out of that, where I can continue to evolve, is vulnerability and honesty in my words, and [accepting that] – people in this room may not even get this! And I have been through so much that was so bubbling and hot and not ready to be accessed for a very, very long time. And I was aware of that; I was afraid of it. All I knew was – I should not touch this. And then I was writing and just cracked open a little bit of it. I was very inspired by Fiona Apple. And say what you want about Kanye West, and that is a scary name to be bringing up right now, but in the context of that one song – ’Today I thought about killing you’ – that always stood out to me, because I just love striking honesty, it’s almost like performance art, to be so absurdly honest. And when I started doing that with this album – I was like – OK, that’s what this is.''
“I was focused on how far I could go with my writing,'' she goes on. “I’d look at Fiona Apple, Björk, or anyone else who is so uncomfortably strange and honest and be like, ‘I want to do that’. Eren played into that. He really heard and saw what I was saying. He’d say, ‘Let’s go even further. I think this is possible. You’re capable of it’. It was crucial to get this reassurance to the point of believing in myself.'' (From a no longer available profile of Grace at The Atlantis Venue website)
Talking about the album on
a podcast in early 2026, with her cowriter Eran Cannata, Cannata explained:
''She came in with such a clear vison of what it [the album] was going to be, that it made the game plan of what we were going to do very clear from the beginning. She knew that it was Childstar and it was these concepts and this concept and we need to cover this and cover this, and I was like - OK what do we have, and you were like – pretty much nothing.'' Grace continued:
''it wasn´t written at all, but I had it completely in my mind''.
Sources of inspiration
In an Interview with
Behind The Blinds Magazine (Nov 9, 2024), Grace talked about her primary sources of inspiration for the album.
“I know how fragile my feelings are, and I’ve waited a long time to lean into them personally, these untapped traumatic feelings inside, and I was never ready until now to confront them. I just knew it was the right time to tell my story in my music, and it’s liberating to reveal a lot of pain. … now I’m doing this for myself, which gives me an invincibility to any fear of what people might think or say. … an experience and song can fester within me for a while, and the greater the feeling, the longer it festers! I’m very disconnected from myself for someone who is a songwriter [laughs], but then that’s why I like writing, because it’s the only time when I can fully connect with my emotions.
I’m calling this album a project rather than an album because I want everything that’s gone into it to feel like performance art and tell a story, and one of the central themes of the project is the pain of girlhood to womanhood and the romanticizing of girlhood into the resentment of womanhood. … Well, I’m imagining it as an art exposition, so it will have a title, the theme, and each song is an art piece around the room, and that format will make up the spirit of the album, like you’re walking through a story, and there will be mixed mediums, from imagery and dancing, to my love of colors and color theory, a lot of stuff I’ve never done before.
I’ve been exposed to so many different visual expressions and inspirations in my life, from art and painting to acting, architecture, interior design, poetry, and strong symbolism. I wanted to look within and deconstruct why things were impactful to me, like, when I read a poem, was it the words, or the flow that drew me in? Or looking at fashion and the juxtaposition in an Alexander McQueen dress, that feminine silhouette fighting against a restrictive material like leather or corsetry. I wanted to take that dagger of honesty behind everything and work out how I can bring that same intensity into a song, and that’s what’s really driven me in this project.''
She explained to
(Dec 18, 2024), that she had an unlikely source of influence throughout the writing process: ''I was heavily inspired by that scene in Midsommar where they're all crying and breathing together,'' she explains. ''I just want to vomit and cry and shake and have it all be a part of everything.'' (IMDB describes Midsommar as “A couple travels to Northern Europe to visit a rural hometown's fabled Swedish mid-summer festival. What begins as an idyllic retreat quickly devolves into an increasingly violent and bizarre competition at the hands of a pagan cult'')
Inspirations for the sound of the album
''I am obsessed with the Mellotron. I basically write everything on it, and I always have. And it normally starts there. The hard thing about an album is that I am a very fluctuating person, so I have to force myself to stay in a phase, which is not natural to me at all. I am basically a re-invented person weekly. So I am trying to stay in the mentality of my album and not move on before it is even released.'' (Interview on Audacity (Radio) October 15, 2024)
In
an IG live in March 2025, Grace explained that she wanted it to sound like
''Melodrama Lorde – Big synths, mellotrons, it's about my torturous unrelenting experience of being a girl in the public eye, and how fucking tortured I get for that. I didn’t mean to write about it. I didn’t have specific concept. And then I started writing about it because I think that I am so absurdly traumatized. And I started spilling out of me, and I thought – oh shit, this is what I want to talk about this. I wanted to talk about that for a really long time. And I feel that people wanted me to talk about it. But it's hard for me to be real. I can only be real through music.
Pitching the album
''I brought the Childstar concept to every label you can imagine, and some people liked it, and some people really didn’t like it. Then I went to Pulse, and they were the first ones to not only like it but take it more extreme. I didn’t want to sign with people who would hold back an idea, but a lot of the art and visual ideas you see have been collaborative or fully from the Pulse team.'' (a href=''https://www.billboard.com/music/pop/grace-vanderwaal-new-album-childstar-pulse-records-1235927391/'' target=''_blank''>Billboard March 21, 2025)
Q: You said that [In an interview with Variety] when you pitched this album to different labels, it “scared a lot of grown men.'' Why do you think people were so reluctant to embrace it?
''Honestly, I don't judge them. I was really pushing the envelope. I was talking about going to red carpets with a bucket of blood or getting a pet lamb for the album rollout. I was saying the most extreme ideas to see how far people would ride with me. The concept of the album is hard for some people to grasp, especially getting into girlhood and womanhood. Now it's a way more developed project, but you had to use your imagination with me in those early creative meetings.'' (
Nylon Magazine March 21, 2025)
Expectations of fan's reactions
In interviews with
Billboard and with
Nylon Magazine, Grace talked about how her fans might react to the album:
''I don’t know if they would be surprised. I think there’s a very small crowd that will feel like I’m stealing a narrative. As a child, I was very aware of the purpose that I served for people — I was this hope and happiness, this innocent angel. But it’s my story to tell, so whatever thoughts those people have, I don’t really care. I’m not a symbol for you''. (Billboard March 21, 2025)''I feel like some people would take what I'm doing as tarnishing my legacy, but I feel the exact opposite. I feel like I'm finally putting a cap on it.''
While her childhood wasn’t all bad — ''the truth is, a lot of it was great'' — she says she wants listeners to be open to nuance instead of expecting a ''black and white statement.'' (Nylon Magazine March 21, 2025)
I think people are cool with it. If you like me, you probably also like my little niches and categories and things that I’m a personal fan of because we probably all like the same things. I think that it works out. What I’m trying to say is, I don’t think that I’m exploring something that’s probably too off the realm of what people enjoy who listen to me. If it doesn’t really resonate, and they just grew out of it, that’s OK too. It happens. That’s how it goes.
If I’m being so honest, I just want people to watch this and think “she’s capable.'' I want people to be excited to see what I can create and what I can do. I think I can do so much, and I want to give so much to people. I guess that’s what I want people to see.
I don’t know what I would want them to know. I guess that everything you see or hear comes from me in some way or another. I definitely would always want people to know that. I’m really, really passionate about that. You’ll never see or hear something that didn’t come from me. (Hollywood reporter April 11, 2025)
Production
Grace and Eren Cannata wrote and recorded the bulk of the material at facet House in LA. (according to a no longer available profile of Grace at The Atlantis Venue website)
Godfrey Furchtgott who plays strings on “Fade'' posted on Instagram
“spoiler alert. we love a JSBach chaconne style arp; we love tremolo, we love a producer who asks for these things? @erencannata!
Reception
The Australian Music Magazine live Wire wrote: “Childstar is a raw and compelling listen wrapped up in engaging melodies and whip-smart lyrics that sting your conscience and make you rethink the ‘Beg For It’ lifestyle. … What I really like about this album is the cynicism within Childstar which shows the world that Grace VanderWaal inhabited with people motivated purely by self-interest. Grace VanderWaal expresses in her song writing the brutality of growing up under the surveillance of the public eye.'' (A href=''https://thelivewire.com.au/2025/04/04/album-review-grace-vanderwaal-childstar'' target=''_blank''>Live Wire April 4, 2025)
(Online music blog
Melodic Mag! called the album:
Vulnerable, courageous, and authentic
Euphoria Magazine described the album as
“a piece of art that not only proves her brilliant artistry but also proves her hand in creating this art. …Her vocals are a powerful belt, filled on this album with loss and pain, as well as cheeky wit. She is a poet, writing for years to interrogate what she knows of the world.
CelebMix, a celebrity focused online magazine) (April 5, 2025) provided a thorough review of the album. The wrote “CHILDSTAR is a hauntingly poetic excavation of identity, autonomy, and the aching complexity of coming of age under a spotlight you never asked for. … Across CHILDSTAR, the production remains hauntingly minimal; strings stretch, melodies ache, and silence becomes its own language—deliberately sparse, so there’s nowhere for her to hide. But that’s the point. She’s not hiding anymore. In the end, CHILDSTAR is more than a comeback album—it’s a reckoning.'' Proud, Brand New and Homesick each got a separate review (found under the individual songs in the catalog).
The music and arts site “
Glassefactory'' (April 22, 2025) called the album
a cohesive concept album that makes for a good time, even if not listening for the story. … CHILDSTAR features a wide array of genre influences. It blends the smooth textures of R&B and pop melodies, while tracks like “Babydoll'' and “Beg For It'' thump with dance-driven drum patterns. Her project resulted in a resilient, authentic, and emotional experience. The production, vocals, and songwriting seems to be in the right place, at the right time, and in the right way. Grace is able to turn the project from emotionally rich and raw to upbeat and catchy. The drums and instrumentals in “Babydoll'' and “Beg For It'' shows a trend we’ve been starting to see: a fusion of dance music with pop styles. Grace uses this to make a unique and original sound. … The album keeps the listener engaged as it progresses. Throughout the experience, the album continually keeps the listener guessing and wondering what’s to come. … CHILDSTAR is a thrilling and engaging journey which gets better with each listen.
