Internationally acclaimed artist and actress Grace VanderWaal releases her highly anticipated sophomore studio album, CHILDSTAR via PULSE Records. Undoubtedly her most personal body of work to date, on CHILDSTAR VanderWaal amplifies the sound of healing scars, shedding skin, and stepping into her power.
CHILDSTAR: Final Act, a short film co-directed by Grace VanderWaal with Luca Renzi and Jacob Boehme, and co-choreographed by VanderWaal and Renzi. The video features five captivating performances from CHILDSTAR, including “Proud,” “Brand New,” “Homesick,” “Behavioral Problems,” and “Fade.” Heartbreaking, captivating and cathartic all at once, Grace bares her soul, sharing her experiences growing up in the public eye through song, dance and raw emotion in each of these five performances.
Next month, Grace takes CHILDSTAR on the road, with a six city North American headline tour, marking her first since 2019. CHILDSTAR – ON TOUR kicks off May 4 in Chicago, and includes dates in Toronto, Washington, DC, New York City, and two nights in Los Angeles, before concluding May 21 in San Francisco.
Speaking about the album, Grace reveals, “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 realized, 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.”
In “Proud,” an old music box plays a lilting lullaby in the song’s opening. “Promise I’ll be small. I won’t take up space at all…Ground yourself. Remember your place. You don’t have a voice yet. You don’t get to say,” she sings. Strings hang over a wave of distortion, climaxing on an affirmation, “‘Cause you’re so special.”
“As a kid, you have an undying need for validation,” Grace explains. “In some cases, you abandon yourself, and you aren’t granted what you need mentally. You’re choosing to be strong, only because it’s your responsibility to be strong. You’re adopting strength when it’s not appropriate. It was important for me to use phrases like, ‘‘Cause you’re so special’, because they’re weaponized words to control children.
Since you’re young, you want to feel strong, mature, and grown up, but no kid should have to do all of those things. Proud is the story of the ‘golden child’ archetype. A child who neglects their needs in order to be seen as valued, loved, or mature. It’s the first song off my new album CHILDSTAR.”
Bells toll and strings swoon on “Brand New,” the album’s focus track. Her delivery barely cracks a whisper, overflowing with emotion. “It’s about me being widely sexualized and objectified at a young age,” Grace explains. “It’s important to talk about all of the different layers. You wonder, ‘What if I dream of being a sexy woman? What if it’s that something I want? Am I still just a girl at the end of the day? Am I subjecting myself?’ It’s a love-hate relationship and a commentary on the patriarchy.”
Then, there’s “Homesick.” Against sparsely plucked acoustic guitar, Grace’s vocals quake, “I’m homesick for a day that never happened.” “You’re romanticizing an unattainable memory,” she says. “For my entire childhood, I thought, ‘When I have an apartment in New York City, everything will be okay.’ Now, I’m grown up, and I think, ‘Everything would be okay if I was just waking up at seven and waiting for the school bus again’. Nostalgia is painful. We always look back at a moment we considered to be the epitome of perfection, but was it ever real?”
Ultimately, Grace’s words are about to make a bigger impact than ever. “When I started writing the album, I thought it was going to fuck me all the way up,” she leaves off. “I was really scared to open up these memories, because the art was going to be so raw. I realized the majority of the pain was because it was unspoken—like this weird secret I was carrying around. It feels really good to undress the past. It gave me a voice and power when I had felt incredibly powerless before. Maybe these words can give somebody else power.”
The arrival of CHILDSTAR follows a whirlwind 2024 for Grace VanderWaal, which included a spine-tingling performance at the 2024 Kennedy Center Honors and a featured role from the legendary
Academy Award-winning filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola, in his epic, “Megalopolis,” starring alongside Academy Award nominees Adam Driver and Laurence Fishburne. The film, which made its premiere at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival, received a seven-minute standing ovation for the famed director’s work.
VanderWaal’s debut EP, Imperfectly Perfect was the biggest selling EP in 2016, entering the Billboard 200 albums chart at number nine. The following year, she released her first full-length studio album, Just The Beginning to vast critical acclaim. Between releasing music, she has toured with everyone from Florence + the Machine to Imagine Dragons. Among many accolades, she earned a Teen Choice Award in addition to receiving the Billboard “Women in Music” Rising Star Award and becoming “the youngest person ever” to be featured on the Forbes 30 Under 30 music list. Not to mention, she starred as the title character in the Disney+ film series Stargirl and Megapolis.
Finding herself independent again in 2024, she dove into creating what would become her next musical statement. With a pen in hand, she’s writing the next chapter of her story—on her own terms.
For more information and to purchase tickets, visit gracevanderwaal.com/tour.
