Are Paramore really over? What the new Hayley Williams album tells us
Hayley Williams’ choice to release 17 new songs via a promo code linked to her hair-dye product is wild enough. Not even 48 hours later, the songs have been removed.
But the spurt of revealing lyrics, several pointed videos, and a puzzling piece of merchandise have led to Paramore‘s future hanging loosely in the balance. What does it all mean?
Like most young girls in the late 2000s, I was obsessed with Twilight. Not because of Robert Pattinson’s handsomely pale face as he awkwardly resists the urge to demolish Kristen Stewart’s hapless Bella, but because of the soundtrack. Paramore’s ‘Decode’ picked up on the mercurial garage rock of their first album, 2005’s All We Know Is Falling, and the biting pop-punk of their second album, Riot.
After that, Williams became a household name for most in the alternative community. The Paramore frontwoman tackled the world with powerhouse vocals in a five-foot-two frame. Taylor Swift, fellow Nashville musician and latest tour buddy, once said, “There is not a stage that Hayley Williams has ever stepped on that she did not devour”.
That wasn’t exactly the case. Williams might have appeared a rebellious spirit furiously carving out a space for women in rock, but the industry always had a tight leash on her. In 2003, when the infamous redhead was only 14 years old, she signed a contract with Atlantic Records for eight whole albums.
Young and naive in a ruthless industry, she signed as a solo artist, despite insisting that she was in a band; this would come back to haunt her in 2010, after brothers Josh and Zac Farro quit the band and slammed the project as a “manufactured product of a major label, riding on the coattails of Hayley’s dream”. Josh had dated Williams, too. Only Zac eventually returned.
The surprise album
The Atlantic deal ended with the flourish of their 2023 dance-punk album This Is Why. The band freed themselves from the shackles of hegemonic surveillance thanks to six Paramore albums and two solo albums on Williams’ behalf.
The frontwoman’s first move? To surprise debut a song on a local Nashville radio station, in ode to her anti-depressant, ‘Mirtazapine’.
The song’s strong ’90s rock energy posited angsty shoegaze leanings and frenetic guitars. Only days before, Paramore released four new tracks on their deluxe version of All We Know Is Falling to celebrate its 20th anniversary. Their cover of Failure’s grunge-rock tune ‘Stuck On You’ wouldn’t be misplaced next to the new Williams track. A fair few Reddit threads exploded with excitement. I even had the pirated version open as an Instagram reel, repeating in a delirious loop.
Williams’ countenance is generally inextricable from a flamed halo of colour above her brow. As Paramore simmered on the back burner, the star became the co-founder of Good Dye Young. Until now, her music and her business have been kept ostensibly separate. That is, until Hayley followed up on her new single with 16 more songs available via a code accessible only when you purchased a new yellow hair dye named “Ego”. Only 2,000 units were available, all hand-signed by the ‘Misery Business’ vocalist.
Rather than generating a personal code for each purchase, a single copy-paste gave the entire internet access to the treasure behind the blinking block of HTML. A string of randomised digits, and you’re in. It’s real—a whole 17 tracks, formatted like computer science homework by a novice technician. No credits. Free from the prying eyes of a label, Williams decided to take us back two decades to do over her entrance into the industry via a nostalgic portal into the past.
The 17 tracks were placed haphazardly across the screen. The code behind each upload suggested a specific order, but only the tech-savvy would’ve thought to dissect the binary placenta of the newly birthed music. Instead, the listener is invited to question where things end and where they begin, fitting, given the clean slate Williams gushes her acrobatic vocals across.
Her two previous albums have been cataclysmic and brazen, but never as heavy as the beautiful, addictive ‘Mirtazapine’. 2021’s Petals for Armor mixed intriguing jazz influences into sonic wanderlust bubbling with stop-start pop-experimentalism, while Flowers for Vases/Descansos opted for a slow-burn acoustic approach that stripped bare to find peace.
The new collection of songs, which fans believe is also titled Ego, rests on conventional pop structures and melodies, occasional R&B influence, and a playful shudder of trip-hop throughout. ‘Mirtazapine’ only lyrically indicated where Williams would take us: down into the depths of glum and despair, the gallows for the lonely-hearted.
“My final act of love was surrender”
If Paramore’s first public split morphed from the weary nature of the “coattails of Hayley’s dream”, this album might read as the self-flagellation of Hayley’s nightmare. The record’s first track, ‘Kill Me’, describes Williams’ torment at repeatedly learning the same lesson. “Go ahead and kill me,” she sings.
Throughout, she offers a hardness of exterior that exists concurrently with an inner debasement. It harks back to her 2023 solo track, ‘Dead Horse’, which opens with a very-real voicemail of the star apologising that the song was three days late, “Sorry,” she laughs timidly, “I was in a depression. But, I’m trying to get out of it now”. The claw marks on the side of the cave are as deep as ever.
Rumours of a Paramore split have largely ignited over lyrics focusing on the love story at the centre of the band. In 2022, after years of speculation, Williams confirmed she was dating long-time guitarist Taylor York to The Guardian. For a time, their love was as peachy as a dream. During the Eras Tour, Williams would face York and sing the love ballad of an age, ‘The Only Exception’. Fans would swoon, wishing for a love like that.
But on Ego, Williams is undoubtedly at the edge of something.
In ‘Disappearing Man’, she speaks of loving someone unconditionally and endlessly “until there was no you to hold”. She sings atop the folky backing, “My final act of love was surrender”. If she gives up York, a large chunk of Paramore goes with him.
At the risk of falling into chaotic Reddit holes, York has been missing from much of Paramore’s press lately. Drummer Zac has since released his own solo project, after concurrently working in his other band, Half Noise, for some time. Williams proudly paraded his debut party online, but the shy moustached guitarist had disappeared. The timing seems pointed.
Even more worrying are the lyrics on ‘Love Me Different’. She details at great length a love that has ended after a “friends to lovers trope” finally came true. Over warbled coastal synths, she sings, “And I know that you’re probably telling yourself that no one’s gonna love me like you did / And I know that you’re probably right about that, but someone’s gonna love me different”.
She adds later, “The pleasure and the agony’s all mine”, a statement lifted and printed across her social media and streaming platforms.
This might only be eclipsed by the reassurance on the aptly titled ‘I Won’t Quit’ that details how, “Come hell or heaven, angels or devils”, Williams is defiant she will see things through.
Despite this, what is most surprising about Ego is her unabashed political statements. Notwithstanding using her Instagram story to call out movements such as Trumpism and climate change, Williams has been unable to call it how she sees it in her music. Finally independent, she attacks racial stereotypes in Christianity, singing on ‘True Believer’, “They say that Jesus is the way but then they gave him a white face / So that they don’t have to pray to someone they deemed lesser than them”. The south, the singer assures us, will not rise again. It is a wild exhalation after decades of restraint.
Can we not raise this logic atop all the otherwise revealing songs that offer speculative evidence of Paramore’s demise? There are some things Williams might have wanted to say on her terms. It is possible that songs like ‘Love Me Different’ were written long ago, depicting a disaster that was avoided. Aren’t the best lyrics left to fester in their excess?
“Hayley Williams is my favourite band”
The band’s burgeoning from the roots of Williams’ solo career is an eventuality often highlighted at Paramore’s live shows, if only to deny its potency. “We are Paramore!” Williams would yell down the mic after heavy-handedly introducing her bandmates.
This I knew to be true, but when the “Misc” folder blinking surreptitiously in the corner of the orange-yellow galaxy of her website opened onto a new piece of merchandise that read, “Hayley Williams is my favourite band”, I blanched.
The white T-shirt adorned with black-block capitals was buried within a folder containing a voice memo, a picture of some lyrics written on a child’s colouring book, and a video of a Phoenix show from behind the band. Many online insisted that this must be an indication of her solo career.
However, the design is also a tongue-in-cheek reference to a line of Paramore merch uploaded in December 2024 and still available for purchase, which reads, “Paramore is my favourite singer”. The band tried another approach with a merciful synecdoche that insisted, “We are all Paramore”. I have this line of merch hanging at the back of my wardrobe, thinned, happy now to prove some speculative point. The irony laughs back at those bracing themselves for the unit’s end.
Paramore are one of the most popular bands in the world. If their universally inspiring pop-rock can’t tell you that, let their ever-climbing Spotify stats do the talking. Now that her record deal is over, Williams is pulling us back into the past to dissect the underbelly of their hard-earned success. This road-less-travelled belongs to the Nashville teen who signed a toxic contract in hopes of a moment, like this, when she could leak an album because what she has to say is one big yell, not the bite-sized murmurs she’s been afforded.
Without Paramore casting their light over everything, Williams would not have the courage to befriend the monsters in the shadows. So hear this: the only thing that may be in jeopardy here is a romantic relationship. Williams is not the type to quit.
