Paramore carefully engages with emo nostalgia
Band celebrating past with fans on tour but also releasing album with new sound
Twenty years ago, if you told Paramore vocalist Hayley Williams that she’d become one of the most influential pop singers in America, she might have offered little more than a scowl. As a punk sprite, miraculously gifted with the lung capacity of a Southern church choir, she couldn’t have seen it then — nor could her childhood friends-turned-bandmates, Zac Farro and Taylor York — but Paramore would go on to craft songs that would alter the trajectories of rock and pop.
Artists such as Olivia Rodrigo, Demi Lovato and Willow Smith have all cited Paramore’s music as the blueprint for their own snarling pop-punk confessionals.
“What feels most merciful about it is that we didn’t know we were doing anything different back then,” Williams says inside the band’s Los Angeles studio. “I use the word ‘merciful’ because we could not have predicted that people would give
(an expletive) 20 years later. We were just eating peanut butter and living the dream.”
Williams, 33, drummer Farro, 32, and guitarist
York, 32, have wrapped production on the band’s album “This Is Why,” set for release on Feb. 10. The lead single of the same name — and the band’s first new offering since the 2017 album “After Laughter” — is a funky tapestry frilled with tambourines and angular dashes of guitar. Paired with a crisp “Mod Squad”-evoking video, “This Is Why” weaves in tendrils of rock ’n’ roll’s past but lodges the band firmly back into the foreground of pop’s present.
The band first teased “This Is Why” in September, with a photo of the players’ faces smushed against glass. It called to mind the stifling social restrictions brought on by COVID-19, and the residual hostility between people. “This is why I don’t leave the house,” Williams sings on the new track, “You say the coast is clear/ but you won’t catch me out!”
“How sad it is that we’ve gone through this horrible thing globally, as humans,” says Williams. “Whether it’s racism, or conspiracy theories ... I think about how the internet is supposed to be this great connector, but drives us further inward and further apart. I’ve watched people be so awful to each other. How could we go through these things together and come out worse?”
Ironically, Paramore is greeting more people than it has in the last four years as the band recently hit the road for the first time since 2018. The tour includes three nights at the pop-punk and emo festival When We Were Young, set for Las Vegas in October.
Paramore will co-headline the fest with another essential emo group, My Chemical Romance. Yet there’s a catch: They may have to perform at the same time on opposite stages.
“They want war!” jests Williams, a longtime MCR fan. “We did not think there was going to be the kind of demand there is. We’re careful about how we engage with nostalgia; five years ago we would have said ‘absolutely not’ to this. But I think it’s significant that we feel confident enough to maintain the journey that we’ve been on and celebrate with these fans.”
Some of the fanfare hasn’t computed for
Williams, who came to fame during a vastly different time for women in rock music. Paramore used to be relegated to smaller, designated female stages at festivals. While still a minor, Williams was written off as sexual fodder by punk gatekeepers; and by her own admission, “Misery Business,” which viciously dressed down another girl, has aged poorly since the 2000s. Williams retired the song from the band’s repertoire in 2018, citing sexist lyrics, but the song briefly resurfaced at April’s Coachella festival, where Williams performed a course-corrected version with superstar Billie Eilish.
“It wasn’t cool to be feminine back then,” Williams explains. “I put a damper on that for my own confidence, because it was hard to go into a male-dominated space — not even as a woman, but as a little girl.”
The band’s 2017 album, “After Laughter,” is a
12-track dance-off with depression that conjured the world-music infatuations of new wave groups like Talking Heads.
“Somehow we metabolize all these styles that we loved growing up, or that we randomly discovered, and it still sounds like us,” says Williams.
The band members further indulge their sonic curiosities on “This Is Why,” which is accentuated by syncopated rhythms and jagged guitar rock riffs. The band absorbed the sounds of U.K. acts like Radiohead and Bloc Party, says its producer Carlos de la Garza; the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ 1985 funk-punk LP, “Freaky Styley,” also played a role during the recording process.
“You just have a new animal,” he says of the trio.
“It’s only lately that my outside and my inside world are kind of congruent, where I feel safe,” says Williams, motioning at
Farro and York. “I think as more LGBTQ people (enter mainstream) conversations, people are now familiar with their term ‘chosen family.’ This band kept me out of a lot of trouble. It gave me a place to belong and identify with.”
Paramore’s live shows have served a similar purpose for its diverse fan base. Prior to the pandemic, Paramore shows culminated in Williams picking a fan from the crowd to hoist onstage and sing along with the band.
On social media, people share videos of Black and brown Paramore fans — long marginalized in emo and the music industry surrounding it — shaking and crying with glee as they sing their favorite Paramore songs opposite Williams.
“I feel a very ferocious passion and want to protect people that don’t look like me,” says Williams.
“Not that there’s any
comparison, but there’s something that we learned from not knowing where to fit in growing up,” adds Farro.
“We benefit from the joy of people feeling free and welcome at our shows,” says Williams. “I want people to see different fans onstage. If everyone had the same opportunities, I think we’d be surprised (to see) who would step up when given the chance.
“It is our responsibility to uplift new artists and young people,” says Williams, who has amplified indie artists like Phoebe Bridgers, Nova Twins and Pom Pom Squad on her podcast, “Everything Is Emo.”
“I’m stoked it’s turning around, that there’s more people of color in the scene, and so many rad new bands that are teaching bands like us,” says Williams. “We have to continue to make it easier and more hopeful and more equitable as a scene.”