In the hushed dark of Racket NYC this past Saturday, the air felt contaminated with something ancient and urgent—like a whisper from the past threading its way through the steel veins of Manhattan. And when Grace VanderWaal took the stage, it wasn’t so much an entrance as it was an emergence. Hair swept, eyes glinting with cinematic ache, she moved with the grace of someone older than her years—and sang with a voice of someone who had lived them all twice over. The performance was a living autopsy of fame’s glittering wounds.

As the first crystalline notes of “Proud” drifted through the crowd, silence gripped the room like reverence. “Promise I’ll be small. I won’t take up space at all,” she sang, and it was if every child inside every adult in the audience stirred at once. In that moment, Grace was not just performing—she was testifying. Her breath became a ritual, each lyric a needle pulling thread through the collective memory of everyone who had ever been asked to shrink themselves to be loved.

The set ebbed and pulsed like a tide—each track from her new album CHILDSTAR unfurling like a diary page read under a nightlight. VanderWaal’s voice has always been singular, but on Saturday it shape-shifted—from porcelain fragility to smoldering fury. “Brand New,” the album’s focus track, glowed with discomfort and courage. “It’s about me being widely sexualized and objectified at a young age,” she explained in the album notes. Live, it felt like exorcism—searing, shaking, necessary. She reminded the audience of the sentiment behind not only this song but the album as a whole, reflecting on the forced maturity instilled in her during her time as a young phenomenon; how she dreamt of growing up only to find the moments of bliss stripped away from her. It is a message many young girls can connect with, especially in this age of digital media—we don’t want to be seen as small, naïve, unaware, rather powerful, sophisticated, self-assured but in that fight to be respected, we lose the innocence of childhood.

Then came “Homesick,” a ghostly waltz of longing. “I’m homesick for a day that never happened,” she sang, and the lyric hung in the rafters like cigarette smoke. In a room of 500 strangers, she made nostalgia ache like a wound that never had a name.

There were moments when she danced—gritty, almost feral—and others where she stood impossibly still, letting her silences hang louder than any chorus. Between songs, she spoke little, but when she did, it was like hearing an echo from a parallel life. “I felt for a long time I was a walking shadow of myself,” she said in a statement about the album. Onstage, she was anything but a shadow. She was fire, she was fallout, she was rebirth. She commanded attention in a way that didn’t scream comeback, but rather pulsed like a debut.

Grace VanderWaal’s CHILDSTAR is not an album. It is an artifact.

It sounds like cracked mirrors and lullabies. Like trauma stitched into melody. It’s the sound of a prodigy peeling off the glittered armor handed to her at age 12 and standing, vulnerable and powerful, in the wreckage.

On “Behavior Problems,” she toys with sarcasm and sweetness, examining the way girls are policed into politeness. “Beg For It” and “Call It What You Want” bristle with resentment and reclamation. These are not love songs; they are survival ballads.

CHILDSTAR is Grace’s reckoning with the public’s projections, and her private unraveling. It’s Fiona Apple in a bedroom mirror. It’s Lorde’s Melodrama if it had grown up in New Jersey. It’s a scrapbook of broken girlhood and the sonic documentation of putting oneself back together with threadbare hope and a bulletproof pen.

Where her earlier works shimmered with precocious optimism, CHILDSTAR bruises beautifully. It is unflinching, raw, and full of songs that might save someone at the edge of themselves.

By the end of the night, the applause wasn’t just for her—it was for everyone who had ever been told they were too much, too loud, too young. VanderWaal took her pain and choreographed it. She sang the things no one else dared to say. And as the light faded at Racket NYC, Grace didn’t just close the show—she closed a chapter.

In CHILDSTAR, she’s not begging to be understood anymore. She’s demanding it.

And we’re listening.