How Hayley Williams’ new album puts you first
Some might call Hayley Williams‘ third solo album, Ego Death at a Bachelorette Party, lazy. By releasing 17 of the 18 songs as singles, she invited fans to choose their order on the album, absolving herself from the weight of a final decision.
On the contrary, Williams’ new album is the very first album to centre the listener, to put you first. Besides being an incredible hour-long project overflowing with unique lyricism and boundless energy, Ego Death at a Bachelorette Party imbues meaning-making with a new politics of care at a time when music needs it the most.
In her original refusal to call the incomplete collection an “album”, the ‘Misery Business’ singer already challenged notions of what a full album was: whose voice delineates the beginning and end of a project? Is it the monotone of the record label, money-grabbing hand clamped around the neck of the artist? Is it the artist, solely? Is it the listener, the consumer, without whom the work couldn’t exist?
After releasing each track as a single on streaming platforms, Williams took to social media to ask fans how they might order each song. She took hundreds of entries seriously, sharing fan-made spreadsheets and graphs, commenting on her own perception of the song’s placements, and the friction between each order.
Williams addressed this on her Substack, written just after the small window of time in which the songs were only available on her own MySpace-esque platform. “Before today’s official ‘release’,” she wrote, “I had 17 song files posted up on a website so that only certain people would find it. The point was to offer an experience of music that would necessitate connection and working together on some level.”
She later added, “This has felt like a return to something simpler. I’m tempted to say it’s how music discovery should feel but I might just be dating myself.” It’s clear that Williams’ main intention was to centre the lost art of music discovery; by allowing fans to structure the relational meaning of the album, it becomes an infinite point of discovery, an infinite collective consciousness. As a consequence, Williams’ own upheaval fades to the background. As does the sickly Spotify algorithm.
Eventually, Williams thanked her fans for their input and announced a final, round-out track for a work that, despite no official release, had already found shape within and across so many lives. It is fitting that ‘Parachute’, the 18th release and the one that punctuated the conversation, is her most gut-wrenchingly personal.
Recency bias aside, ‘Parachute’ might just be the best song on the album. It has all the lush shoegaze influences of ‘Mirtazapine’ and all the self-flagellating charm of ‘Love Me Different’. It’s also scathingly personal. “Asked me on a plane from Rio, do I ever think of us? / And you were at my wedding, I was broken, you were drunk / You could’ve told me not to do it, I would’ve run, I would’ve run.”
All the while, her voice maintains a gravelly intensity, culminating when Williams yells, “I would’ve done anything!”
Here, the 36-year-old Williams has ensured that this is the only track she has full control of, in a move that embraces the integrity of her dark admission. Williams married Chad Gilbert (of pop punk band New Found Glory) in 2016. They divorced in 2017, after Gilbert’s continual infidelity. In this intensely confessional track, Williams puts herself first.
By allowing the listener to explain and expand on the meaning Williams had laid down in the recording studio, she is saying, ‘Look, the meaning I have created is only half of the story. Your meaning completes mine’. Not only is this revolutionary in a time that ethical musical consumption demands more involvement from the listener, but it also manages to shirk from too many prying eyes.
In her free-wheeling release exercise, Williams has also (ironically) shrugged off the nitpicking insatiability of the critic. Any critical body that first dissected the singles as an “album” was immediately wrong. Their review is void. Any other review became quickly obsolete without the just-released full set list. After living her entire adult life under misogynistic public scrutiny, this joyride around the houses is the perfect tale of gleeful resistance.
We see it played back in the music video for the titular track, ‘Ego Death at a Bachelerotte Party’. In it, Williams largely meanders around Nashville, her hometown, exploring the community with friends and long-time collaborators. She skips around the city centre with her headphones on, same as you, same as me.
Paramore’s remix album also prognosticated this collective approach. On 2023’s Re: This Is Why, the band allowed musicians large and small space to take on each of the original songs. Highlights include Remi Wolf’s take on ‘You First’ and Wet Leg’s take on ‘C’est Comme Ca’.
On her Substack, the Grammy-winning singer looked back at the full-circle moment that kick-started the new music movement: the release of 2005’s All We Know Is Falling, Paramore’s first album. “That time in my life, when that album was fresh, was the last time I remember music feeling as light and liberating as it does lately,” she wrote.
Things are “light and liberating” now only because she has shared the load; Williams re-centres the listener in a time where music consumption is increasingly capitalistic and unethical. By putting you first, she has shown us all the “light”.
