PARAMORE IS A BAND

In the heat of the midday sun, amplified by the sweet-and-sticky humidity of central Maryland, Paramore headbanged above a dehydrated crowd at the D.C. date of the Vans Warped Tour.

It was their third year on the traveling circus, arguably their first without making obvious allusions to Christianity in their onstage banter. They dressed in coordinating ketchupand mustard-colored skinny jeans on a makeshift main stage in the middle of the lawn at Merriweather Post Pavilion, long before Animal Collective’s experimental indie rock-pop would become synonymous with the place. It was 2007, two years after Paramore made their Warped debut on the first official Shiragirl side stage for female-fronted acts—separate, and certainly not equal, despite the best of intentions of its creator, NYC riot grrrl Shira Yevin. Someone threw a tallboy can of water at the stage, a tiny weapon and tinny product that later would be retooled, given irreverent marketing, and sold to the millennial masses as “Liquid Death.” It certainly tastes like it. Paramore’s set was sandwiched between “scene” bands lost to time (Amber Pacific, Scary Kids Scaring Kids) and those few who’d sustained careers, easing themselves into familiar paths to veterancy (Circa Survive, Killswitch Engage). There are only so many ways to innovate a palm-muted power chord; at least, that’s the dominating criticism fans of this music have adopted as true.

Even then, Paramore were pros, amplified by their fearless frontperson and her raised-in-the-church vocal range that could fill a canyon. Hayley Williams was undeniable. Though, like many 15-year-olds who wore their internalized misogyny like a point of pride, a relic of a particular ’00s adolescence, I had done my best to deny them, to deny her. This band was bigger than an industry that mocked the action of crying and called the women it didn’t allow on stage “rock chicks.” (If you don’t recoil at the phrase, it’s time to schedule a colonoscopy.) If only they could survive it.

Before me, on Zoom, are Paramore, made up of three members from that early lineup: drummer Zac Farro (’04-’10, ’17-present), guitarist and principal songwriter Taylor York (involved from the beginning but became a full-time member in ’09), and singer Hayley Williams (she briefly departed in 2015). They’re seated by a fireplace in Los Angeles; Williams is on the ground in front of an armchair, in a familiar position you’d take after a large family dinner before the board games come out. They’re all clutching coffees; their style has dramatically evolved from the era of asymmetrical bangs and Myspace scene queens. Their energy is closer to that of a midsize indie group than one of the biggest rock bands on the planet— unruled by ego, relaxed.

Here’s the thing about Paramore that goes largely unremarked upon: There’s no exact model for them. There’s no band that looks, sounds, and acts like them that they can idolize and aspire to resemble; there’s only fumbling around a kitchen with the lights switched off and somehow exiting unscathed every time. No Doubt come close, maybe, but that’s a stretch—particularly given Gwen Stefani’s questionable politics. There is a peculiar freedom in setting your own precedent, in existing without an imperfect model to imitate. You can only choose to keep growing, surprising the people who expect time to stand still and the skinny jeans to stay on. Or you can choose to stop. Paramore chose both.

Paramore began in 2004, two years after a 13-year-old Hayley Williams moved from Meridian, Mississippi, to the Nashville suburb of Franklin, Tennessee, and met the boys who’d eventually make up the band’s initial lineup. First came the Farro brothers, guitarist Josh and drummer Zac, whom she linked up with at a weekly tutorial for homeschooled kids held at a church. That same year, Williams signed a contract with Atlantic Records—the first 360 deal in history, wherein the band and the label were inextricably linked in every way—that would carry Paramore through all six of their full-length LPs: 2005 s debut, All We Know Is Falling; the career-making Riot! in 2007; the crisis of faith Brand New Eyes in 2009, which was the catalyst for the band’s most severe interpersonal turmoil. Then, 2013’s self-titled album led to their latest era: 2017’s synth-poppunk After Laughter, written following Williams’ divorce from New Found Glory’s Chad Gilbert; and finally, 2023’s motorik post-punk This Is Why. (More on that in a moment.)

Infamously, Williams’ name is the only one that appears on the agreement, which expires after this LP—it’s been the source material for a lot of the group’s public infighting, leading to more than a few lineup changes, despite the fact that Williams has consistently pushed to be recognized as a member of a full band. For years that meant wearing a shirt with the text “Paramore is a band” scribbled across the front while on stage. The messaging wasn’t always understood, or it was ignored outright, a peculiar kind of disempowerment: The first song Paramore ever wrote is “Conspiracy,” which Williams describes as “literally about people shopping me as a solo artist, and I was in the band.” It wasn’t enough to distract an unwelcoming music media from foaming at the mouth, like when Kerrang! spent the overwhelming majority of a 2007 cover story painting a tabloid image of a husky-voiced Williams as a pop-punk despot who may or may not have been sleeping with her band. She was a teenager.

Naturally, after two decades of the stuff, this is a band that hates being misjudged. “I’m still learning that people are just gonna say the shit that they want to say about you, and it might feel really shitty,” she says. “I hate feeling misunderstood. Like, if I had the energy, I would probably have a rebuttal for every fucking thing anyone says on Twitter about any given moment of our career, because I hate when people twist things. But I gotta learn to let that go. And ‘Misery Business’ was a huge part of it.”

She’s referring to the biggest song of Paramore’s career— 2007’s “Misery Business,” the endlessly hooky and spiteful single the band announced they’d retire in 2018 at the storied Nashville Municipal Auditorium, drawing particular attention to the lyrical line “Once a whore, you’re nothing more.” Williams had stopped singing that line long before the band made the decision to cease playing the song altogether, but at that moment, it felt like a new paradigm: So much third-wave emo centered on misogyny, inherent and brazen. Many of those bands had started apologizing for past chauvinism, but none had bothered to acknowledge those sexist implications or to correct them. It was a sacrifice, excising their best-known and most immediately recognizable song that just so happens to possess a totally vindictive message: “a Tuesday afternoon at the bus stop, a schoolgirl bitchfest,” as Williams describes it.

The reality is much more complicated. Paramore never actually retired the song. “We just didn’t play for four years,” Taylor York explains. “The next show after [the Nashville] show, we played it.”

Williams jokes that Farro, who left the band in 2010 with his brother and rejoined in 2017 without him, was the catalyst: He really wanted to play it. But it was Williams who performed the track first—with pop star Billie Eilish during her Coachella headlining slot. She heard Eilish wanted to sing a song with her, “and I was like, Please don’t be ‘Misery Business,’ please don’t be ‘Misery Business.’” She laughs. “I think that was a turning point for me: That song meant something to her that maybe I’ll never know or understand.... But it really changed my mind about the song. What young people do with it is not [to] slut-shame people with it.” Now the band invites a fan from the crowd to perform the song with them, completely transforming its meaning. Williams recalls inviting a fan who uses a walker on stage at a recent concert in Atlanta: “They potentially go to shows all the time and feel like they can’t participate in certain aspects of the show—like ‘I fucking see you, and we’re getting you up here.’” She smiles. “It’s so much bigger than the original message of the song, that I was being petty.” “It’s become a new song for us,” Farro cuts in. They speak in the space between each other’s thoughts, a musical call-and-response. “All of our fans are a bunch of sluts and I wanna party with them!” Williams jokes. “[But seriously,] I hate when people put ‘Misery Business’ on a women’s empowerment playlist. We have so many fucking songs.”

“If it became an anthem for misogyny, if it was doing harm and became a symbol of that, of course we wouldn’t touch it,” York jumps in. That much is clear: This band isn’t interested in pandering to nostalgia. It’s the reason why performing at Las Vegas’ emo high school reunion festival When We Were Young in 2022 was a challenge for them. “Nostalgia is beautiful but—” York starts, “—we’re not horny for it,” Williams ends.

Rehashing the past doesn’t come naturally. In 2007, when Paramore were just about to release their careerdefining sophomore LP, Riot!, their label had an interesting request. “The president of Atlantic Records at the time called me while we were in the middle of an MTV shoot. We already had all this amazing shit happening for Riot!, and the album hadn’t come out yet.” Williams leans forward. “He calls me, I don’t know why I answered, and he’s like, ‘I’m gonna get you on a helicopter, and you’re gonna write with Chad Kroeger.’ I was 18 years old and thank God I had that thing you have when you’re a teenager and you’re ignorant to power. You’re self-assured. Adult selfdoubt hasn’t kicked in yet. I was like, ‘No, I don’t want to do that. That makes no sense. “Misery Business” is really cool; people are gonna like it.’ We’ve always protected this.” She gestures to her bandmates.

Then, of course, “everybody was like, ‘We knew it was gonna be the biggest record ever!”’ She laughs. “And I’m like, ‘No, you tried to get me to write with fucking Nickelback.’”

The second (i.e., no longer emo) era of Paramore is marked by After Laughter, the band’s 2017 record, a sonic deviation, an exercise in post-rock and funk-punk stretching their previous musical signatures to reveal a true elasticity. For the most part, that album was celebrated—they pulled from ’80s influences like Talking Heads and Paul Simon, but Williams’ easily identifiable voice grounded them in their history. Elsewhere, conversation surrounding the band’s detour away from guitars took over (there are many guitar parts on AL; they just don’t align with pop-punk’s familiar structures). “The gain was just turned down.” York says with a laugh. “Everything was a lot cleaner, more angular.”

Then, in 2018, a death close to York as well as Williams’ divorce from Gilbert made it clear that the band needed to pump the brakes—and for the first time ever, they took a break that was their choice, not a brief respite following crisis management because someone chose to leave the band. As Williams describes it, “People don’t realize how much life we have lived in the context of Paramore. We wanted to relate to each other outside the confines of a band.” Then the pandemic hit, forcing them to “figure out [their] identity all over again, in the context of the apocalypse.” She released two solo records she was planning to tour on in 2020. Farro wrote more music for his solo project HalfNoise. In this period of self-reflection, York quit drinking. The temporary break lasted nearly six years.

The road has brought them here, to 2023’s This Is Why, the band’s latest LP and easily their most versatile. The world’s first introduction to the LP was the last song they wrote, the agoraphobic anthem “This Is Why,” with its snarling chorus and No Wave guitars. When it veers left in the bridge, there isn’t a reclamation of the marimbas in their 2013 hit “Ain’t It Fun,” yet it sounds like it. You could make an extensive list of unexpected Easter eggs like that on this album, but really all you’d be doing is tracing the trajectory and identity of this band. York was just “getting fancy with pedals and shit,” as Williams describes it. The marimba is “one of my favorite things in the world,” says York. The real deal makes an appearance on the sharp “Figure Eight.”

“This is the first time we’ve had the same lineup two records in a row—” York begins a thought, and cuts himself off: “Sorry, I’m having an ADD moment.” Farro supports him, attempting to finish the sentence before York jumps back in: “We really wanted this to be the most collaborative record we’ve ever done. Normally, one person will write most of the music. But it’s no hard, fast rule—it’s been survival.” This time, they worked together. Closer “Thick Skull” came first; a midtempo dirge pulled from the depths of the band’s collective interiority. Williams calls it “a caveman drumbeat, a home base for us, where we meet in the middle with our musical tastes: bands like Failure or Hum, or heavier stuff like Deftones.” She plays piano on it, for the first time in years.

“We always know we can write those kinds of songs,” Farro says. “The harder songs are more upbeat, more guitars in the chorus.” The post-punk “Running Out of Time,” an ode to the mundanity of time management, was a breakthrough in that way. It’s easy to imagine the Strokes-y “C’est Comme (?a” and the sneering riffs of “The News” feeling similarly cathartic. “[When you make a new album,] you naturally want to make a turn so you’re not making a Bor C-rate version of what you already did,” says York.

“Growing out of emo, as [critic] Jess Hopper once termed it, ‘where the girls aren’t,’ is the best thing that ever happened to Paramore,” says Geoff Rickly, frontman of Thursday, scene vets just slightly Paramore’s senior— and certainly an influence on the band; Williams once had a poster of Rickly so giant in her house, it had to be hung sideways. “Sure, Riot! is great, but After Laughter, Hayley’s solo work, and especially This Is Why are fantastic. Paramore have shown me that you can defy expectations while defining success on your own terms, in a way that I didn’t think was possible in this business.”

In 2023, much has been made about Paramore’s legacy. The band crops up as influences in Willow Smith’s elemental emo, PinkPantheress’ genre alchemy, Snail Mail’s barn-burner riffs, Olivia Rodrigo’s and Chloe Moriondo’s entire repertoires, BFFs boygenius, and pop-punk polymaths Meet Me @ the Altar. “[Hayley Williams] was really the only woman who was super visible on stage when we were growing up and was a true role model for us,” says MM@TA singer Edith Victoria. “[She taught us] you can allow your sound and your art to evolve while still staying true to your roots and the band everyone knows you to be.” What is ignored is the minuscule age differences. Phoebe Bridgers, for example, is just four years younger than York and Farro. “They’re, like, 12 and we’re 16,” Williams says of the difference. “But it does feel like an ocean away. We were always the youngest people in the room and we’re not now, and most of the time, we’re not the oldest people, either. ‘What table do I sit at?”’

The difference is important to note because Paramore, early on, were forced to make concessions to childhood and adolescence, the effects of which are still felt. “There was a day on Warped Tour [after Riot! came out that] I remember Zac saying, ‘I’m just not going to see my little brother or sister grow up,”’ Williams begins. “I was not at a place in my life where I was willing to feel those feelings. I was on the escape route: ‘Get me the fuck away from home.’ I wouldn’t let myself think about that. I simultaneously feel really grateful, and I can get really sad about it.”

“That was a huge reason for me leaving the band,” Farro says. “I was 12,13 when we started. All of our teenage years were spent on the road. I remember birthdays in Germany, Japan, in Atlanta, Georgia, on the No Doubt tour.” So, he moved to New Zealand to lead a “normal-ass life. My best friends were surfers that were plumbers, normal and amazing people. I would have always resented this band in an unhealthy way if I hadn’t done that.”

At one point, Farro remembers, MTV had huge prints of Paramore hanging in Times Square. “I asked our manager if I could have mine, and I rolled it out one day in my backyard. It was 100 feet [long]. It went so far back, and I’m just standing on my porch, looking at my huge body. Like, what a juxtaposition! That’s two perfectly good parts of our lives—here’s this thing that’s exposed, in this safe space in Nashville...” He starts to trail off, connecting those vastly different realities, how they exist at odds within him and this band. “The best thing I can say about it is that the three of us are so close, and our crew, and everybody we work with is so grounded and loving. If it wasn’t for that, we’d be super screwed.”