After two decades tied to the demands of a controversial contract with Atlantic Records, Hayley Williams is stepping into independence – and she’s doing so with defiance and unconventionality.
By the time she was 15, Atlantic had approached her with a 20-year contract as the industry’s first 360 deal, allowing them to profit off not only her record sales and streaming, but from every aspect of her career such as touring and merch. They also wanted her as a solo artist, not a band member. But she refused. Williams was clear from the start that, if she was to commit to a record deal, it’d be alongside her friends, making pop-punk music in a band. And so, Atlantic agreed, making way for the birth of Paramore.
Now six studio albums in, their latest record This Is Why closed the book on Atlantic in style, earning the band – currently made up of frontwoman Williams, guitarist Taylor York and drummer Zac Farro – their second and third Grammy Awards after a five-year hiatus.
Now pivoting towards artistic freedom, Williams kicked-off her new era with an out-of-the-blue announcement – an exclusive listen to her new track ‘Mirtazapine’ on Nashville public radio station WNXP, who were calling for donations following funding cuts to public media. The song itself is textured with the harsh guitars and fiery vocals akin to those on Paramore’s 2007 album Riot!, with lyrics that pay tribute to the antidepressant Mirtazapine which Williams has cited for helping her through her open battle with depression and PTSD (‘Mirtazapine/you make me eat, you make me sleep’).
On the 28th July – almost a week later – a total of 17 songs were released onto her website as MP3 audio files. Fans were made to wait another four days for all 17 tracks to be released onto streaming platforms, though as – quite strikingly – 17 different singles, not an album. Williams then prompted fans to create their own playlist and track order for her to take inspiration from and eventually make into an organised album. After four weeks of reviewing fan-created playlists, Williams collated the tracks into what would be her first album under her own independent imprint named ‘Post Atlantic’ – a tongue-in-cheek reference to the problematic label that signed her as a teenager.
Alongside the album release, Williams dropped a new track titled ‘Parachute’, as well as announcing there are two songs still to come under the respective titles of ‘Good Ol’ Days’ and ‘Showbiz’ . ‘Parachute’ acts as – for now, anyway – EDAABP’s closing track, opening with hushed piano chords which are juxtaposed by its sucker-punch chorus that overtly hints at a lost love or failed relationship (‘I thought you were gonna catch me/I never stopped falling for you’) – a common theme that unfolds throughout the album.
The opening track ‘Ice In My OJ’ kicks-off the album with potency and energy, including another not-so-subtle bruising for those behind signing her at 15 (‘Lotta dumb motherf*ckers that I made rich’) and how this forced her to toughen-up from a young age in order to acclimatise to a mature industry – something that is also explored in ‘Hard’ (‘Only listened to testosterone music/I had to kill my feminine just to do it’). The line that precedes this (‘Got married once in combat boots’) is a direct reference to her wearing combat boots in her wedding with Chad Gilbert in 2014 (divorced in 2017) after comparing going into marriage with going into ‘battle’.
The feeling of loneliness and isolation seeps through a number of the tracks – not least in the rawness of ‘Glum’ (‘Do you ever feel so alone/that you could implode and no one would know’) and in the similarly stripped-back ‘Negative Self Talk’ (‘Can hear my heart beat over emptiness now’). This glossy acoustic-rock feel trickles into tracks like ‘Whim’ – a track that sees Williams seek truth and clarity amidst uncertainty – and ‘Zissou’ – which seemingly follows the context of the 2017 Paramore track ‘Pool’ (‘I’m underwater/no air in my lungs’) and Williams’ 2020 track ‘Dead Horse’ (‘Every morning I wake up from a dream of you holding me underwater/was that a dream or a memory?’ by using water-related metaphors to describe an abusive relationship (‘I keep telling you the water’s fine/you show up in a scuba suit’).
Williams goes on to unleash indignation by challenging the far-right politics that seems to have plagued America, such as on the album’s title track (‘I’ll be the biggest star at this racist country singer’s bar’), while the eerie instrumentation on ‘True Believer’ is accompanied by a similar opprobrium at racial divisions in traditional religion (‘They say that Jesus is the way but then they have him a white face/so they don’t have to pray to someone they deem lesser than them’).
EDAABP is Williams at her most transparent and sees her navigate her way through a period of turbulence. She meets these challenges with honesty and vulnerability and leaves fans waiting with bated breath for its final two tracks.
9/10
