PARAMORE\u2019S ATLANTIC DEAL EXPIRED a few months earlier in December 2023, leaving Williams a free-agent for the first time since she was a teenager. The internet soon rejoiced, celebrating her and the band\u2019s newfound freedom from contractual obligations. Paramore had been touring in Australia, wrapping up a long run of dates on the heels of This Is Why, when Williams started free-writing again, blogging on her then-private Substack. \u201cGlum\u201d came around this time. \u201cI let all of it go,\u201d she tells me. \u201cThat\u2019s when I was like, \u2018Oh, man, I\u2019m really scared.\u2019 I started noticing it.\u201d She always hated that her name was the only one on the contract. It divided the band, even when things were going well. The growing pains of being an independent artist set in, and she let them. \u201cA lot of times when I\u2019m done with something, say I\u2019m moving houses, I\u2019ll get mad at the house to help me let go of it,\u201d she says. \u201cAnger has always been the motivator, but it\u2019s also been the buffer, so that I don\u2019t have to feel devastation, sadness, whatever else. I felt a lot of anger in my body, but as I was writing I had to admit to myself, \u2018This is just fear. I\u2019m gonna free-fall out of this. This is going to be a good thing.\u2019\u201d <\/p>\n
After the contract was up, Williams expected to make another Paramore album with York and Farro, because she \u201cthought the liberation would explode out of us into something.\u201d She started listening to The Bends, wanting to change the band\u2019s sound. She thought, \u201cWe can do anything! We can really take this opportunity to fuck shit up, because no one knows what to expect, anyway.\u201d But her bandmates weren\u2019t ready for that, and Williams was left with a lot to expel and no place to put any of it. \u201cIt\u2019s so easy to think of what you stand up against, but it can be harder for people to say what they stand for,\u201d she gestures. \u201cIt was this feeling of coming up to a cliff and knowing that, with or without a parachute, I\u2019ve gotta jump and know that the shit\u2019s coming out of me one way or another.\u201d<\/p>\n
Ego death eventually came, and then the songs. \u201cRealizing that the deconstruction of my faith and the deconstruction of my internalized misogyny were just practice for the deconstruction I would have to do of my identity being so wrapped up in Paramore,\u201d Williams says. \u201cI listen to these songs and I think there\u2019s a lot more red herrings than I understood when I was writing them. A lot of it\u2019s about Paramore, and I can see that maybe more easily now.\u201d She can see how the This Is Why tour stirred a lot of fear in her. Tig Notaro\u2019s One Mississippi helped, too. \u201cThere\u2019s this scene where her stepfather\u2019s like, \u2018Well, your mom\u2019s dead. I\u2019m not legally bound to you anymore.\u2019 And I was like, \u2018Woah,\u2019\u201d she remembers. \u201cThat, in a very strange way, connects me to this feeling of, if Paramore is not a signed artist to this thing, and we\u2019re not bound to the work that we\u2019ve been expected to do, what are we and who am I if I\u2019m not in that thing? The basket and the eggs got thrown out the window. It hurts. This whole time I\u2019ve told everyone that Paramore is a band. But, somewhere in my psyche, Paramore is me, too. I know the guys have had those feelings as well. It\u2019s very confusing to unravel, so I\u2019ve been doing that little by little, trying to understand who I am now.\u201d<\/p>\n
That understanding began with \u201cDiscovery Channel,\u201d a song that came to life at producer Daniel James\u2019 house in Nashville. Williams and Daniel\u2019s wife, Elise Joseph James, were watching the MTV Classic and heard Bloodhound Gang\u2019s \u201cThe Bad Touch\u201d come on. \u201cI went to the bathroom and I was like, \u2018I know the song\u2019s about fucking but it\u2019s also about how it feels to be in a relationship,\u2019\u201d she remembers. \u201cKnowing people intimately, you pull each other apart all the time. That can be friends, that can be romantic, whatever. I have felt that so many times with Paramore. God, man, we\u2019re so locked into our dynamic that was set in stone when we were teenagers. And I imagine it\u2019ll always be that way, and it\u2019s always something to pick up and work on.\u201d Even after she and James finished \u201cDiscovery Channel,\u201d with the Bloodhound Gang interpolation in her pocket, she didn\u2019t realize how much work it was going to take just to find herself in the midst of what Paramore has become.<\/p>\n
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Williams says she felt disconnected from her body during the This Is Why album cycle. She was sick too often, confused about the meanings of her songs even more so. \u201cI knew what \u2018Big Man, Little Dignity\u2019 was about, and I knew \u2018Thick Skull\u2019 had something to do with the accusations that have been thrown at me through all the drama of Paramore\u2019s lifespan,\u201d she says. \u201c\u2018Figure 8\u2019? Kind of the same thing but more directed at the industry we\u2019re a part of. I had vague ideas, but I couldn\u2019t figure out why I felt so disconnected.\u201d The answer started revealing itself once she put out Ego Death At A Bachelorette Party<\/a>, this year\u2019s greatest pop triumph. \u201cI go back and listen to [This Is Why] and say, \u2018Oh, that makes sense now.\u2019 I think it\u2019s because I was so afraid. I was in a relationship that I\u2019m trying to protect so hard, I\u2019m not gonna say much about that on the Paramore album. I don\u2019t know if I really knew what I wanted to talk about on this album, but I couldn\u2019t help but talk about shit. Once that faucet turned on, I was discovering all sorts of shit that started flying at me that I thought I had digested and that\u2019s why I didn\u2019t feel it anymore. But it was in there.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIce In My OJ\u201d started as a joke. A lot of Ego Death At A Bachelorette Party started as a joke. It\u2019s something Williams is working on, because she hates how \u201coverly nice\u201d she is and wishes she \u201ccould tear apart that Southern nicety type shit.\u201d Writing this record, Williams mourned deconstructions of herself, lingering breakups, contract releases, and two decades of tour exhaustion. There was no room for people-pleasing. \u201cWhen you\u2019re grieving, I think there\u2019s a version of us when we\u2019re grieving that is the realest,\u201d she admits. \u201cWe have nothing to hide, and there\u2019s no use or no energy to do it.\u201d Stoned with James and his wife, Williams showed them a Christian song she was hired to sing on as a kid. \u201cWe were laughing about that and Dan was like, \u2018We have to sample this. This is too funny. I\u2019ve never heard this before and it\u2019s crazy that your fans know about it but it\u2019s not common knowledge,\u2019\u201d she explains. \u201cThe night we demoed [\u2018Ice In My OJ\u2019] I was gone. Just screaming into the mic.\u201d That was 14-year-old Hayley saying all the shit she was trying to say on \u201cConspiracy,\u201d the first Paramore song ever. \u201cIt\u2019s this feeling of someone who is older and in a suit taking away my power and I am too young to do anything about it and I\u2019m screaming at them. I\u2019m in a band but they\u2019re taking off with my life in a way that I\u2019m not even old enough to understand. It was good for me, whatever it was.\u201d<\/p>\n Williams and Steph Marziano co-wrote \u201cParachute.\u201d They\u2019d worked together on Williams\u2019 solo debut, Petals in Armor, and Denai Moore\u2019s We Used to Bloom before that. \u201cThe feeling in the stuff that she sends me is so immediate,\u201d Williams beams. \u201cI knew immediately when I heard the piano that it was going to be sad but it was going to feel hopeful and uplifting in some way\u2014that it was going to be so good live, even though at the time I was like, \u2018I probably won\u2019t be touring but this would be sick at a festival.\u2019\u201d She came up with the \u201cParachute\u201d verses quickly, but she still doesn\u2019t know how to talk about them\u2014about everything that she\u2019s been through in the last year, really. That hasn\u2019t stopped fans from theorizing online, believing that \u201cParachute\u201d marks the end of Williams\u2019 relationship with York. But it\u2019s more complicated than that. \u201cIt\u2019s hard to talk about anything in life that, for me, is present and feels ongoing in my body, because it feels like I\u2019m talking about things prematurely,\u201d she says. \u201cBut that\u2019s where songwriting can be prophetic and bring you to a liminal space that exists where you don\u2019t have to carry it.\u201d <\/p>\n Getting \u201cParachute\u201d over the finish line meant that Williams needed to lend a voice to the versions of herself that existed in the past but had yet to speak. Versions of her that requested a stage. \u201cThere was a lot of stuff in my relationship that really confused me. I do this thing\u2014same with the band\u2014where I think that a relationship is going to part the clouds, the sun\u2019s going to come out, and I\u2019m going to fully understand why I went through everything that I went through. It\u2019s going to make sense, it\u2019s going to connect the dots, and then I\u2019ll be healed and be able to live the rest of my life from that place.\u201d <\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s just not the case,\u201d she continues. \u201cI don\u2019t think it\u2019s the case with anything, let alone romance, which is messy. I put a lot of faith in things that aren\u2019t even really supposed to catch me. I\u2019m supposed to learn how to figure that out by myself. The bonus is when you have people around you that support you in that and that you can support in that journey. I felt like I was speaking from the part of me that has severe abandonment issues and who has continuously made decisions to partner with people that were never going to fix me in the first place but, also, maybe weren\u2019t willing to look at their own abandonment issues in a way that I think would be productive in a relationship. That\u2019s why it\u2019s been hard to see some of my lyrics in black and white, because I do think a lot of them have been prophetic for me.\u201d<\/p>\n NEAR THE END OF PARAMORE\u2019S turn opening for Taylor Swift\u2019s Eras Tour, Williams realized that the band\u2019s growing popularity was becoming a dangerous game for her both mentally and physically. \u201cI remember feeling like, \u2018I\u2019m performing. I\u2019m having fun. I\u2019m here for this crazy experience, but I really desperately need to get back to whatever\u2019s underneath this, because I\u2019m not connected to myself,\u2019\u201d she says. \u201cOnce I let that happen, it was all I could do.\u201d She recounts the \u201cBluebeard\u201d chapter in Clarissa Pinkola Est\u00e9s\u2019 book Women Who Run From the Wolves: \u201cI started reading it seven years ago, and what I took from it is that once you see the damage or the wound, it starts bleeding and you can\u2019t stop it. It has to bleed out. You have to witness it, and this was me doing that for myself as a more grown, hopefully wiser [person], but I also feel dumber than I\u2019ve ever felt. I feel brand new.\u201d<\/p>\n Mitchell: Which song on Ego Death At A Bachelorette Party took the most courage to witness?<\/p>\n Williams: \u201cLove Me Different\u201d I felt a little embarrassed of. Even though that chorus was old, I\u2019d had it bouncing around in my head. \u201cParachute\u201d and \u201cGood Ol\u2019 Days\u201d were also an embarrassing feeling. The further I get away from them, the more connections I make to my feelings about how I idealized Paramore, and that was hard for me to understand.<\/p>\n The release strategy for Petals for Armor was staggered: 15 songs spread out across two EPs and a full-length during COVID. Some people loved the method, many loathed the wait. \u201cI think my preference was, \u2018Let\u2019s puke it all out at once, just the same way that I felt it,\u2019\u201d Williams laughs. But she liked the idea of prolonging the Ego Death At A Bachelorette Party rollout, mostly because there were no initial plans to tour it (since its release, she\u2019s announced a US tour with Water From Your Eyes supporting). \u201cI thought, \u2018Well, we can have fun with it. I\u2019m gonna sing with friends and bounce all over the place so we can lengthen the rollout, just so that it gives me time to travel a bit and do some interviews and let the vinyl get pressed, because that takes a while.\u2019\u201d <\/p>\n Ego Death At A Bachelorette Party arrived in August unnamed, first as a gift to supporters of her hair product company, Good Dye Young. But when Williams got bored with the current album-cycle model, so she tried fucking it up by uploading all 17 songs to a low-quality website and putting them on streaming services as individual singles. It was this grab-bag collection of career standouts with no sequence: depressant tribute (\u201cMirtazapine\u201d), music industry disavowments (\u201cBlood Bros\u201d), sensual respite (\u201cZissou\u201d), blood oaths (\u201cBrotherly Hate\u201d), vocal experiments (\u201cGlum\u201d), and pop triages (\u201cWhim,\u201d \u201cLove Me Different\u201d). \u201cTrue Believer,\u201d Williams\u2019 timeliest song yet, reels against Southern gentrification and the region\u2019s racist archetypes. Out of nowhere, she had gathered a double album without stumbling through its miscellany. Like the Steph Curry billboard<\/a> that showed up on West Pico Boulevard in Los Angeles last week\u2014an image of the point guard taking a jump-shot, lined up with the moon\u2019s nightly orbital radius by an astrophysicist\u2014Ego Death At A Bachelorette Party is not some lucky gimmick but a curated, well-timed spectacle. <\/p>\n Williams is in the process of deleting all social media off her phone, including her burner accounts. The plan is to stick to Substack, but the back and forth between her and her fans is making it a \u201cpainful divorce,\u201d as she calls it. But every good spectacle needs its co-conspirators. Months ago, she asked her fans to make their own Ego Death At A Bachelorette Party tracklists. One person even set up a website that catalogued every fan-submitted playlist globally, which Williams used as a reference for the album\u2019s song positions. She knew \u201cIce In My OJ\u201d was the opener and \u201cShowbiz\u201d the closer, but it took a communal effort to finalize the lineup in-between. \u201cIt\u2019s hard to innovate on anything at this point. I loved that putting music up for free on a website felt like an ongoing conversation. Being someone who really probably overvalues the community aspect of everything, it felt cool to watch people connect to each other on the internet in the ways that we used to.\u201d<\/p>\n But her team wanted to hold \u201cParachute\u201d and \u201cGood Ol\u2019 Days\u201d for after the LP\u2019s initial streaming release. \u201cI\u2019ve been scared of these songs, because once you put a feeling out there, even if you\u2019re not writing it in a song, it\u2019s out there and people can make it whatever they want,\u201d she admits. \u201cBut because we waited on those two songs, it gave me so much more to think about.\u201d She had stomach aches for days until \u201cParachute\u201d came out. She couldn\u2019t eat the night before \u201cGood Ol\u2019 Days\u201d hit streaming. \u201cUnfortunately for me,\u201d she sighs, \u201clearning my biggest lessons comes from suffering, and I do it to myself. Maybe I\u2019m a masochist.\u201d But that suffering allowed her to learn uncomfortable lessons. \u201cThe chorus of \u2018Good Ol\u2019 Days,\u2019 when I listen to it, I have romanticized a version of myself that existed post-my divorce in this very free space, in my late-twenties\u2014trying to reconnect with the world after being in a relationship that was bad for me. I think I worshipped that version of myself. I thought she knew it all. She was prettier than I\u2019ve ever been in my life. She was freer. She was healthier. My body, my internal world was healthier.\u201d<\/p>\n Williams, starving and stressed, figured out that After Laughter-era Hayley was actually not healthy at all. Her marriage had fallen apart but she swore she was making better decisions for herself. \u201cI was still not, really,\u201d she concedes. \u201cI wonder: Are we always going to be like that? Do we just always look back a couple of years or five years and go, \u2018Oh my God, what a dumbass?\u2019 I don\u2019t know. I really hope that it gets a little bit more grounded as I get older. But I\u2019m glad we saved those songs. I\u2019m really proud of them.\u201d And there\u2019s something to be said about the version of Hayley Williams on Ego Death At A Bachelorette Party versus the version of Hayley Williams on 20 years\u2019 worth of Paramore albums. This is a good document of who she is while surrounded by the people she\u2019s most comfortable with. Her lyrics are more visceral now (\u201cI will love you forever if that won\u2019t make it worse\u201d), in a way not so dissimilar to the lyrics on After Laughter (\u201cThere\u2019s still a thread that runs from your body to mine\u201d). I think we\u2019ve gotten to know her a lot better this year.<\/p>\n Some of that honesty stems from her coming to terms with the music scene she entered in the mid-2000s\u2014a period in post-punk where bands and fandoms were incredibly cruel to the young women around them (\u201cI got condoms thrown at me [at Warped Tour],\u201d she recalled<\/a> in 2020). But the good people stood out, Williams says. \u201cBecause we were so much younger than most of the other artists, we didn\u2019t really hang out with a lot of people. But it was nice to connect with people who didn\u2019t blow us off immediately because of our age or because we grew up in the South and the church.\u201d Bands like Underoath, the Chariot, the Starting Line, and mewithoutYou understood that and let Paramore in. \u201cThere weren\u2019t any girls my age around,\u201d she remembers. \u201cI know now, in hindsight, how hard that was for me and how much that probably damaged me. It\u2019s very similar to how I feel about growing up in the church. Going to youth group gave me a sense of community in a town that\u2014we weren\u2019t having all-ages shows down the street that my mom could easily drop me off at. Those were downtown. I have a love-hate relationship with how I grew up, and it\u2019s mostly hate, but I also have to acknowledge the good foundations it gave me.\u201d <\/p>\n Mitchell: I\u2019d like to imagine that people our age are happy that we all got to grow up together.<\/p>\n Williams: I would like to imagine that too, because that makes me feel less lonely. That makes me feel like there\u2019s chosen family that I haven\u2019t even met yet, all over the place.<\/p>\n Most of the people Hayley Williams meets are strangers. But they\u2019re all here and the music connects them. The music\u2019s always connected us. She has a phrase she keeps repeating: \u201cLife is long.\u201d Nowhere is that more prevalent than on Ego Death At A Bachelorette Party\u2014a sign of what future lies beyond Paramore for Williams when she needs it, even though Paramore isn\u2019t going anywhere anytime soon. 20 years ago, she and her band were the youngest musicians on every tour they went on. But it was obvious to her early on that same-aged kids were coming to see them play. \u201cI remember how that felt, and it\u2019s been so cool to grow up with a lot of our longtime fans,\u201d Williams says. \u201cI saw a couple of them at one of the EGO NITE events we put on recently, and I teared up. We all look older, and we all have very serious things going on in our lives. But when we see each other, there\u2019s all these updates. It does feel like you\u2019re growing up together. I really cherish that.\u201d <\/p>\n Almost every person I know has a Hayley Williams connection. Maybe they met her work for the first time at Eras Tour. Maybe they were a closeted trans kid in the noughties watching her challenge femininity before any of us knew what a binary even was. Maybe they were a jock in a conservative small-town with \u201cMisery Business\u201d on a playlist. Maybe now they\u2019re a TURNSTILE, Rico Nasty, Moses Sumney, or David Byrne fan. Rappers love her, moms adore her. She\u2019s Steph Curry on the Golden State Warriors, and if \u201cAin\u2019t It Fun\u201d was her only song, she\u2019d still be the greatest frontwoman of the 21st century. She\u2019s an artist no one wants to gatekeep, because she kicks down the fence\u2014whether that\u2019s by helping artists advocate for better recording contracts, daring Morgan Wallen to square up<\/a> at Whole Foods, taunting her old label by releasing her album on \u201cPost-Atlantic,\u201d or singing \u201cthe South will not rise again \u2018til it\u2019s paid for every sin\u201d while flanked by a Black string ensemble and a \u201cMississippi God Damn\u201d sign on Jimmy Fallon\u2019s now-apolitical talk show. Ego Death At A Bachelorette Party confirms to the world the hero Hayley Williams has always been. <\/p>\n Matt Mitchell is Paste\u2019s music editor, reporting from their home in Los Angeles.<\/p>\n ![\"Ego](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/BE715A91-5C69-4FB0-8039-75F85AFCAD70.jpeg\")
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