Hayley Williams is my favourite band

Twenty years into her career, Hayley Williams is finally an independent artist. When she was scouted by Atlantic Records at the age of 14, Williams was offered the dream of being a solo star. She pushed back, telling the label she’d rather make music with the scrappy emo band she’d started with her friends from school. As we all know, sticking to her guns was a good call.

Paramore went on to define the noughties pop-punk scene and beyond. Their emotionally raw anthems have inspired everyone from PinkPantheress and Olivia Rodrigo to SZA and Lil Uzi Vert, and over the past five years, the group has become bigger than ever (they’re currently in the Top 20 most streamed rock bands of all time on Spotify). But because of the 360 deal Williams signed when she was 15, Atlantic Records got a percentage from every Paramore record, T‑shirt and ticket sold.

​“If it wasn’t for being young, ignorant and hard-headed, maybe we would have felt exactly how oppressive a contract like that could be,” Williams says of the band’s early years, sitting cross-legged on a park bench in London’s Primrose Hill. Hers was the first ever 360 contract (in most cases, record labels just profit from record sales and streaming) and the practice has been heavily criticised for taking the power from young artists ever since.

Paramore finished their obligations to Atlantic with the release of 2023’s fiery alt-rock spectacular, This Is Why. ​“I just thought it’d be like a birthday party. Oh, we’re finally done. Freedom. But we don’t really talk that much about the grief that can come with good things,” says Williams. ​“It was a giant change that also left me asking ​‘what am I going to push against now?’”

That sadness lit a fuse, and Williams poured misery, rage, frustration and loneliness into her snarling new solo record Ego Death At A Bachelorette Party, which was properly released last week. EDAABP is, according to Williams, a puke bucket of all her influences and everything she needed to say. Glistening pop, new wave, emo and punk all feature, as does tender folk and sweeping electronic music. ​“It’s a lot of chaos,” she grins. ​“If I don’t get the poison out, it’s never going to come out.” Stand-out tracks include Mirtazapine, a scuzzy punk love-letter to anti-depressants, while the twinkling emo of True Believer sees Hayley deconstructing faith and the alt-pop swagger of Ice In My OJ has her calling out the ​“dumb motherfuckers” who she made rich.

The original plan was to make another Paramore record. While playing 46 stadium shows across Europe last year, opening for Taylor Swift on her Eras tour, the band – which includes core members drummer Zac Farro and guitarist Taylor York – had got some demos down between gigs and were excited about a new chapter. ​“The music felt like new territory,” says Williams today, stopping briefly to pet an excitable dog that’s run over. But she’d been on a ​“tear” with lyrics, and needed space on her own to process the turbulent emotions she was feeling. And so, the next Paramore album became a Hayley Williams album.

Earlier this year, she was finishing recording Glum, a moody, black cloud of a track (“I do not know if I’ll ever know/​What in the living fuck I’m doing here”) and realised she was writing about ​“feeling really alone”, which is how she’s felt since she was a kid. ​“It’s probably because I grew up in a broken home and have never known who was going to be there to catch me,” she explains. Williams’ parents divorced when she was 12, and she moved with her mother to Tennessee from Mississippi. This goes some way to explain why she clung so desperately to the chosen family of the band. Still, she’s been the only consistent member of Paramore.

While writing EDAABP, Williams was considering relocating from Nashville to Los Angeles, so she hit up her friend and record producer Daniel James, who’d made that same move. Four days into recording sessions together, they had three finished tracks, including Kill Me, a sarky response to the Christian saying ​“God gives his toughest battles to his strongest soldiers” that saw Williams working through the seemingly constant flow of ​“bad news and family shit” that was coming her way. The sessions were cut short when they had to flee James’s house as the LA wildfires spread. James and his wife moved back to Nashville, and Williams abandoned her plans to relocate. Now living in the same city, Williams and James soon had seventeen finished songs on their hands.

Instead of a conventional release, Williams chose to drop the songs as 17 singles via a password-protected website for Good Dye Young, the hair product company she set up in 2016 with long-time friend and stylist Brian O’Connor. She also encouraged her fans to share the music around, in a deliberate nod to the more communal MySpace era of the internet she grew up on.

​“It just felt like I needed to do the opposite of whatever we’d been doing before,” says Williams, who released the material on her own label Post Atlantic – a tongue-in-cheek reference to the major that had control over her career for two decades. ​“I know every pair of hands that has touched this project, and it feels like a real DIY punk rock community,” she says.

It’s also the first time she’s allowed Good Dye Young to be involved in her music. Her new sunshine yellow dye Ego kickstarted her new creative era. ​“I want GDY to stake some claim in the music world. I’ve always been so afraid of the two things overlapping but… why?” says Williams, who reveals that there’s a ​“really cool” collaboration with Rico Nasty on the way. ​“When you look around at the scene that we grew up in, being expressive with your fashion and your hair was such a huge part of it. Also, when you’re in a country under the threat of fascism, I think it might be quite nice to have some people that stand out as not that. There’s really something about the times we’re living in that makes me more interested in not taming myself as we get older.”

When the 17 standalone singles appeared on streaming services, Hayley invited fans to create their own running order for the project, to help her decide the final tracklisting for its release as EDAABP. The hope was that a handful of diehards would get involved, but in just a few days, the fan-made website hay​leysin​gles​.com had well over a thousand playlist submissions. ​“It’s been really exciting to do something because I think it might be cool, and not to have to convince an entire team at a label about it,” Williams says. ​“The minute I started seeing those fan conversations, I was like, ​‘okay, we can build this together’.”

Hayley Williams has done solo records before, but not with this much freedom. A handful of crossover collaborations in the 2010s were deliberately billed as Hayley Williams from Paramore, while 2020’s solo album Petals For Armor and its 2021 follow-up Flowers For Vases were both full of experimental, delicate electronic music that could never be billed as Paramore. ​“At the time that felt so liberating and so freeing, but I listen back now and can see how I was being a little restrained.”

This is a hangover from spending most of her career trying to convince people that Paramore are a band, and not a glorified solo project. ​“I was really sensitive to it because it hurt my friends’ feelings,” she says, having also experienced the brunt of pop-punk misogyny, being one of the few women in the scene that had a prominent platform. Thanks to a lot of therapy, ​“those voices just feel so quiet and far away now. It’s nice to be able to laugh at the meatheads on the internet who unfortunately did a lot of damage back in the day,” she grins. You can buy a T‑shirt that says ​‘Hayley Williams Is My Favourite Band’ from her online store, which is just one of the ways she’s reclaiming her own legacy with this solo era.

​“In a lot of ways, writing this record gave the 15-year-old version of myself, who felt like she had lost a lot of her power by signing to a major label, a voice. It freed her, so I don’t have to be arrested in that stage of development anymore.”

After the huge undertaking that was the Eras tour, Williams thought she might stay home and just release music. Then she performed her guest vocals on Turnstile’s track Seeing Stars at the band’s free show at Brooklyn’s Under The K Bridge. ​“I remembered, this is what I do, these are my people and I should be where they are,” says Williams of the punk community that turned out in force. ​“Now, I’m so excited to hear someone else screaming their own version of my songs back at me.” (Her and her team are currently figuring out how tickets for an EDAABP tour could remain affordable. ​“When the answer is ​‘no’ on issues like [dynamic pricing], it’s usually just because someone’s being lazy,” she says.)

“That’s where I feel like I get to do my service,” Williams continues. ​“We’re gonna create this space so that people can show up and hopefully feel the same thing I have from this project – this is where I’m understood, this is where I can scream, cry and dance. I guess that’s no different than a Paramore show….”

So, I have to ask, what’s going with Paramore then?

“Do we ever know where we’re at?!” she laughs. ​“We always take huge breaks. In order for us to metabolise shit that we go through as people, it takes the amount of time it takes between albums.” But Williams can confirm that the band are on a break, rather than broken up.

“There are no better musicians in the world than Zac and Taylor,” she says. ​“There are no better performers than [the touring musicians affectionately known as the] Parafour. It’s just magic, man,” says Williams.

“I feel such a vindication in knowing that nobody can discount Paramore,” she continues. ​“But it’s also really important for me to strengthen other muscles and these parts of myself that I deflated because I was scared that people were going to notice me too much.”

It took 20 years, but it seems Hayley Williams has warmed to the idea of being a solo star.

“This album could do nothing, or it could eclipse things I’ve done in my past. Either way, I now have the freedom to go be myself in my own right,” she smiles. ​“And that’s so exciting.”