Artist of the Year: Hayley Williams

PARAMORE’S 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’s 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. “Glum” came around this time. “I let all of it go,” she tells me. “That’s when I was like, ‘Oh, man, I’m really scared.’ I started noticing it.” 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. “A lot of times when I’m done with something, say I’m moving houses, I’ll get mad at the house to help me let go of it,” she says. “Anger has always been the motivator, but it’s also been the buffer, so that I don’t 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, ‘This is just fear. I’m gonna free-fall out of this. This is going to be a good thing.’”

After the contract was up, Williams expected to make another Paramore album with York and Farro, because she “thought the liberation would explode out of us into something.” She started listening to The Bends, wanting to change the band’s sound. She thought, “We can do anything! We can really take this opportunity to fuck shit up, because no one knows what to expect, anyway.” But her bandmates weren’t ready for that, and Williams was left with a lot to expel and no place to put any of it. “It’s so easy to think of what you stand up against, but it can be harder for people to say what they stand for,” she gestures. “It was this feeling of coming up to a cliff and knowing that, with or without a parachute, I’ve gotta jump and know that the shit’s coming out of me one way or another.”

Ego death eventually came, and then the songs. “Realizing 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,” Williams says. “I listen to these songs and I think there’s a lot more red herrings than I understood when I was writing them. A lot of it’s about Paramore, and I can see that maybe more easily now.” She can see how the This Is Why tour stirred a lot of fear in her. Tig Notaro’s One Mississippi helped, too. “There’s this scene where her stepfather’s like, ‘Well, your mom’s dead. I’m not legally bound to you anymore.’ And I was like, ‘Woah,’” she remembers. “That, in a very strange way, connects me to this feeling of, if Paramore is not a signed artist to this thing, and we’re not bound to the work that we’ve been expected to do, what are we and who am I if I’m not in that thing? The basket and the eggs got thrown out the window. It hurts. This whole time I’ve 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’s very confusing to unravel, so I’ve been doing that little by little, trying to understand who I am now.”

That understanding began with “Discovery Channel,” a song that came to life at producer Daniel James’ house in Nashville. Williams and Daniel’s wife, Elise Joseph James, were watching the MTV Classic and heard Bloodhound Gang’s “The Bad Touch” come on. “I went to the bathroom and I was like, ‘I know the song’s about fucking but it’s also about how it feels to be in a relationship,’” she remembers. “Knowing 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’re so locked into our dynamic that was set in stone when we were teenagers. And I imagine it’ll always be that way, and it’s always something to pick up and work on.” Even after she and James finished “Discovery Channel,” with the Bloodhound Gang interpolation in her pocket, she didn’t realize how much work it was going to take just to find herself in the midst of what Paramore has become.

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. “I knew what ‘Big Man, Little Dignity’ was about, and I knew ‘Thick Skull’ had something to do with the accusations that have been thrown at me through all the drama of Paramore’s lifespan,” she says. “‘Figure 8’? Kind of the same thing but more directed at the industry we’re a part of. I had vague ideas, but I couldn’t figure out why I felt so disconnected.” The answer started revealing itself once she put out Ego Death At A Bachelorette Party, this year’s greatest pop triumph. “I go back and listen to [This Is Why] and say, ‘Oh, that makes sense now.’ I think it’s because I was so afraid. I was in a relationship that I’m trying to protect so hard, I’m not gonna say much about that on the Paramore album. I don’t know if I really knew what I wanted to talk about on this album, but I couldn’t 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’s why I didn’t feel it anymore. But it was in there.”

“Ice In My OJ” started as a joke. A lot of Ego Death At A Bachelorette Party started as a joke. It’s something Williams is working on, because she hates how “overly nice” she is and wishes she “could tear apart that Southern nicety type shit.” 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. “When you’re grieving, I think there’s a version of us when we’re grieving that is the realest,” she admits. “We have nothing to hide, and there’s no use or no energy to do it.” Stoned with James and his wife, Williams showed them a Christian song she was hired to sing on as a kid. “We were laughing about that and Dan was like, ‘We have to sample this. This is too funny. I’ve never heard this before and it’s crazy that your fans know about it but it’s not common knowledge,’” she explains. “The night we demoed [‘Ice In My OJ’] I was gone. Just screaming into the mic.” That was 14-year-old Hayley saying all the shit she was trying to say on “Conspiracy,” the first Paramore song ever. “It’s 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’m screaming at them. I’m in a band but they’re taking off with my life in a way that I’m not even old enough to understand. It was good for me, whatever it was.”

Williams and Steph Marziano co-wrote “Parachute.” They’d worked together on Williams’ solo debut, Petals in Armor, and Denai Moore’s We Used to Bloom before that. “The feeling in the stuff that she sends me is so immediate,” Williams beams. “I 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—that it was going to be so good live, even though at the time I was like, ‘I probably won’t be touring but this would be sick at a festival.’” She came up with the “Parachute” verses quickly, but she still doesn’t know how to talk about them—about everything that she’s been through in the last year, really. That hasn’t stopped fans from theorizing online, believing that “Parachute” marks the end of Williams’ relationship with York. But it’s more complicated than that. “It’s hard to talk about anything in life that, for me, is present and feels ongoing in my body, because it feels like I’m talking about things prematurely,” she says. “But that’s where songwriting can be prophetic and bring you to a liminal space that exists where you don’t have to carry it.”

Getting “Parachute” 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. “There was a lot of stuff in my relationship that really confused me. I do this thing—same with the band—where I think that a relationship is going to part the clouds, the sun’s going to come out, and I’m going to fully understand why I went through everything that I went through. It’s going to make sense, it’s going to connect the dots, and then I’ll be healed and be able to live the rest of my life from that place.”

“It’s just not the case,” she continues. “I don’t think it’s the case with anything, let alone romance, which is messy. I put a lot of faith in things that aren’t even really supposed to catch me. I’m 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’t willing to look at their own abandonment issues in a way that I think would be productive in a relationship. That’s why it’s 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.”

NEAR THE END OF PARAMORE’S turn opening for Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, Williams realized that the band’s growing popularity was becoming a dangerous game for her both mentally and physically. “I remember feeling like, ‘I’m performing. I’m having fun. I’m here for this crazy experience, but I really desperately need to get back to whatever’s underneath this, because I’m not connected to myself,’” she says. “Once I let that happen, it was all I could do.” She recounts the “Bluebeard” chapter in Clarissa Pinkola Estés’ book Women Who Run From the Wolves: “I 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’t 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’ve ever felt. I feel brand new.”

Mitchell: Which song on Ego Death At A Bachelorette Party took the most courage to witness?

Williams: “Love Me Different” I felt a little embarrassed of. Even though that chorus was old, I’d had it bouncing around in my head. “Parachute” and “Good Ol’ Days” 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.

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. “I think my preference was, ‘Let’s puke it all out at once, just the same way that I felt it,’” 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’s announced a US tour with Water From Your Eyes supporting). “I thought, ‘Well, we can have fun with it. I’m 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.’”

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 (“Mirtazapine”), music industry disavowments (“Blood Bros”), sensual respite (“Zissou”), blood oaths (“Brotherly Hate”), vocal experiments (“Glum”), and pop triages (“Whim,” “Love Me Different”). “True Believer,” Williams’ timeliest song yet, reels against Southern gentrification and the region’s racist archetypes. Out of nowhere, she had gathered a double album without stumbling through its miscellany. Like the Steph Curry billboard that showed up on West Pico Boulevard in Los Angeles last week—an image of the point guard taking a jump-shot, lined up with the moon’s nightly orbital radius by an astrophysicist—Ego Death At A Bachelorette Party is not some lucky gimmick but a curated, well-timed spectacle.

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 “painful divorce,” 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’s song positions. She knew “Ice In My OJ” was the opener and “Showbiz” the closer, but it took a communal effort to finalize the lineup in-between. “It’s 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.”

But her team wanted to hold “Parachute” and “Good Ol’ Days” for after the LP’s initial streaming release. “I’ve been scared of these songs, because once you put a feeling out there, even if you’re not writing it in a song, it’s out there and people can make it whatever they want,” she admits. “But because we waited on those two songs, it gave me so much more to think about.” She had stomach aches for days until “Parachute” came out. She couldn’t eat the night before “Good Ol’ Days” hit streaming. “Unfortunately for me,” she sighs, “learning my biggest lessons comes from suffering, and I do it to myself. Maybe I’m a masochist.” But that suffering allowed her to learn uncomfortable lessons. “The chorus of ‘Good Ol’ Days,’ 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—trying 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’ve ever been in my life. She was freer. She was healthier. My body, my internal world was healthier.”

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. “I was still not, really,” she concedes. “I wonder: Are we always going to be like that? Do we just always look back a couple of years or five years and go, ‘Oh my God, what a dumbass?’ I don’t know. I really hope that it gets a little bit more grounded as I get older. But I’m glad we saved those songs. I’m really proud of them.” And there’s 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’ worth of Paramore albums. This is a good document of who she is while surrounded by the people she’s most comfortable with. Her lyrics are more visceral now (“I will love you forever if that won’t make it worse”), in a way not so dissimilar to the lyrics on After Laughter (“There’s still a thread that runs from your body to mine”). I think we’ve gotten to know her a lot better this year.

Some of that honesty stems from her coming to terms with the music scene she entered in the mid-2000s—a period in post-punk where bands and fandoms were incredibly cruel to the young women around them (“I got condoms thrown at me [at Warped Tour],” she recalled in 2020). But the good people stood out, Williams says. “Because we were so much younger than most of the other artists, we didn’t really hang out with a lot of people. But it was nice to connect with people who didn’t blow us off immediately because of our age or because we grew up in the South and the church.” Bands like Underoath, the Chariot, the Starting Line, and mewithoutYou understood that and let Paramore in. “There weren’t any girls my age around,” she remembers. “I know now, in hindsight, how hard that was for me and how much that probably damaged me. It’s 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—we weren’t 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’s mostly hate, but I also have to acknowledge the good foundations it gave me.”

Mitchell: I’d like to imagine that people our age are happy that we all got to grow up together.

Williams: I would like to imagine that too, because that makes me feel less lonely. That makes me feel like there’s chosen family that I haven’t even met yet, all over the place.

Most of the people Hayley Williams meets are strangers. But they’re all here and the music connects them. The music’s always connected us. She has a phrase she keeps repeating: “Life is long.” Nowhere is that more prevalent than on Ego Death At A Bachelorette Party—a sign of what future lies beyond Paramore for Williams when she needs it, even though Paramore isn’t 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. “I remember how that felt, and it’s been so cool to grow up with a lot of our longtime fans,” Williams says. “I 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’s all these updates. It does feel like you’re growing up together. I really cherish that.”

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 “Misery Business” on a playlist. Maybe now they’re a TURNSTILE, Rico Nasty, Moses Sumney, or David Byrne fan. Rappers love her, moms adore her. She’s Steph Curry on the Golden State Warriors, and if “Ain’t It Fun” was her only song, she’d still be the greatest frontwoman of the 21st century. She’s an artist no one wants to gatekeep, because she kicks down the fence—whether that’s by helping artists advocate for better recording contracts, daring Morgan Wallen to square up at Whole Foods, taunting her old label by releasing her album on “Post-Atlantic,” or singing “the South will not rise again ‘til it’s paid for every sin” while flanked by a Black string ensemble and a “Mississippi God Damn” sign on Jimmy Fallon’s now-apolitical talk show. Ego Death At A Bachelorette Party confirms to the world the hero Hayley Williams has always been.

Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Los Angeles.