The forgotten masterpiece: How ‘Brand New Eyes’ defined the career of Paramore
When it comes to Paramore, a lot of people like to make the Fleetwood Mac comparison. After all, on the surface, it seems like a no-brainer: A band constantly in turmoil, surging into the spotlight off the back of making some of the generation’s most defining music, propelled by romantic and creative drama behind the scenes. The only difference seems to be the lack of cocaine. Considering less of the stuff passed through Studio 54 in the 1970s than through Fleetwood Mac in just 1978, that’s no high bar to clear, though.
Also where the comparison falls apart is that Josh Farro wishes he was Lindsey Buckingham. I’m not kidding either. You look at Fleetwood Mac and you see a band of creative equals. Without Lindsay, you wouldn’t have ‘Go Your Own Way’, without Christine, no ‘Songbird’, without Stevie, no ‘Landslide’. That was the true battle at the heart of the ‘Mac’—that in order to be the best they could be, they always had to go back to a toxic dynamic.
Not so with Paramore. I know they tried to make “Paramore is a band” happen. We all had the badges when we were kids, trying to talk up Farro’s riffs like he was Jimmy sodding Page because at every opportunity, the band were desperate to prove how legit they were as a real-life rock outfit. In retrospect, the time spent courting the respect of trad-rock bores who care about what a “real” rock band is seems utterly beneath them.
The fact is, Hayley Williams is definitively Paramore. Her songwriting powers the band, her unstoppable charisma as a frontwoman guides them, and her astonishing voice is the killer element that marked them out as a bigger, more exciting deal than just about any other band from the same Warped Tour circuit. So when we listen to what I consider their masterpiece, 2009’s brand new eyes, we’re not listening to their Rumours, the way so many people like to claim.
How does ‘brand new eyes’ define Paramore?
For one thing, we’re not listening to their commercial and critical high point; brand new eyes couldn’t quite live up to the sales of their commercial breakthrough, 2007’s Riot!, which was a solid record with some undeniable singles. In the eyes of critics, two of their most recent albums, 2017’s After Laughter and 2023’s This Is Why got thoroughly well-deserved write-ups that their early work tended to lack. In the eyes of the fanbase, the record has the dreaded “underrated” tag, used mainly by “fans” who live in the past as an example of how much better Paramore were when Josh was in the band.
On a deeper level, we’re not listening to their Rumours because we’re not listening to multiple sides of the same story. What makes that record so vital and so exciting is it’s a musical town hall meeting, with different songwriters popping up and giving their side of the story. brand new eyes is the opposite. We get Hayley’s point of view, and because of that, we get a much more focussed album.
In it, we get the sound of Hayley as not just a songwriter but a leader, a captain of a ship battered by outside storms and constantly battling the threat of mutiny from her own crew. We see her on the offensive, roaring back at people trying to control and undermine her in songs like ‘Playing God’ (“Next time you point the finger I might have to bend it back and break it, break it off”). We see her admitting her frailties on the likes of ‘Misguided Ghosts’ (“’Cause I’m just one of those ghosts / Travelling endlessly / Don’t need no roads / In fact, they follow me”).
We even see moments where she stands at the helm of the ship, trying through sheer force of will to see sunlight breaking through storm clouds and to get the crew to see the same. ‘Looking Up’ is a heroic attempt to cheer up an exhausted band, with lines like “I’ll never trade it in / ‘Cause I’ve always wanted this / and It’s not a dream anymore / No It’s not a dream anymore / It’s worth fighting for” able to inspire anyone.
If anything, what’s admirable about the rest of the band isn’t even their contributions to the songs. Granted, the group have never sounded better as a straight-ahead rock band, the storm they conjure with opener ‘Careful’ proves that. What’s more impressive is their ability to stick around when so many of the words powering their songs are extended skewerings of their character.
Even at the time, it wasn’t under the radar. How could it be? This is an album whose first single and best song, ‘Ignorance’, sees Williams snarling “Where’s your gavel? / Your jury? / What’s my offense this time? / You’re not a judge, but if you’re gonna judge me / Oh, sentence me to another life”. If anything, it’s a testament to the band’s alarming maturity that they were able to go on with lyrics like this. If their skin were any thinner, then we might not have heard it at all.
Williams talked about exactly this in an interview with Kerrang! around the record’s release. She described the band’s first rehearsal in preparation for the album’s recording, and coming in with the lyric to ‘Ignorance’. She said, “I tried to mumble all the way through, but Taylor [York, guitarist] was right next to the speaker and heard every word. He gave me this fierce look—I thought he was going to kill me—and said, ‘So do you want to tell me about those lyrics?’”
She continued, “I ran into the bathroom, I was so nervous. But we talked for two hours and reconciled a lot of tough, heavy things. That song saved our band.” At least for a little bit. Within a year of brand new eyes’ release, Josh and his brother, drummer Zac Farro, had left the band, trying to scorch the earth with a scathing blog post claiming that the whole idea of Paramore as a “band” was absurd. That they were “a manufactured product of a major label” built around making Hayley Williams a star.
In his blog post, he criticised members of the band’s entourage for referring to the other band members as “hired guns” and talking up Hayley as “the real artist”. Hopefully, he’s spent the next 15 years coming to terms with the fact that they were all basically bang on the money. You don’t even have to look at the albums they’ve made since he left to realise this; it’s all there in the music he once had a hand in making.
To me, he should be grateful. When you’ve had a hand in making a masterpiece like brand new eyes, I’d consider that more than enough for me.
