Her old signatures - the gymnastic yawp, the sunny backing band, the sunset-orange hair - are toned down.
Petals for Armor feels like meeting Hayley Williams for the first time. Sometimes a change of setting and a bit of personal upheaval are a recipe for a breakthrough. “ Dead Horse,” a lilting, tropical tune from Hayley Williams’s debut solo album, Petals for Armor, revels in wisdom she’d been tiptoeing around on the last album: “I beat it like a dead horse, I beat it like a drum / Oh, I stayed with you too long / Skipping like a record, but I sang along / And now you get another song.” Sometimes the way to progress in a situation where we feel trapped is to step away from it. When touring for After Laughter wrapped, Paramore went on a break, giving Hayley space to rediscover herself and restructure the relationships that had defined her adult life. By the summer of the same year, the singer was single for the first time in a decade. In retrospect, a song like “Caught in the Middle,” a should-I-stay-or-should-I-go moment where Williams wonders whether force of habit is a good-enough reason to keep an exhausting thing going, seems like a reckoning with an entire way of living. The feeling informs 2017’s After Laughter, a collection of beguilingly bright melodies masking a glum emotional candor earlier songs like “Miracle” and “Emergency” once touched on, albeit mawkishly, as was the tradition in the Alt Press era. Inside, Williams was running to outpace a mounting inner darkness coloring the way she saw herself, her role in her band, and her relationship with now ex-husband New Found Glory lead guitarist Chad Gilbert, whom she met at 18. This all looked idyllic and empowering from the outside, but appearances can be deceiving, principally in music, where good money is spent making sure talent looks as cool as it sounds.
#PARAMORE SELF TITLED ALBUM BOOKLET SERIES#
And Paramore grew up with her, refining its emo style enough to earn a spot in the epochal Guitar Hero series and then slipping out of the party before it died down, pivoting into glossy pop rock in the new decade as scene peers like Fall Out Boy and Panic! strained to adapt to changing times. Williams - who joined the band as a teenager after having split her younger years between metropolitan Mississippi and Tennessee, moving with her mother after her parents divorced - essentially grew up in Paramore. The trek for 2009’s Brand New Eyes ran deep into 2011, at which point the band closed out the year with a series of singles, then spent a chunk of 2012 crafting what would come to be its self-titled album and then hit the ground running at the beginning of 2013 on the Self-Titled Tour, which ran through 2015. Hard-charging riffs carried her sweeping vocals and incisive lyrics across the country, building the band’s profile through endless touring. Photo: Josh Brasted/WireImage/Getty Imagesįor over a decade, Hayley Williams sold gale-force emotional reckoning as the lead singer of Paramore, one of the most successful bands on the forefront of the mainstream emo revolution of the middle aughts. If you came looking for a furtherance of Paramore’s After Laughter’s pop sounds, you’re sucker-punched at the door.
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