Hayley Williams Is My Favorite Band

Ego Death At A Bachelorette Party

Hayley Williams has always wanted to be in a band. On The New York Times’ Popcast, the newspaper’s pop music criticism podcast, Williams talks about feeling a deep longing as a younger kid to find her people and make music with them. She credits meeting Zac Farro, Paramore’s founding drummer, in a homeschooling program, as the beginning of her path to discovering these people. “As soon as I got to start playing with [Zac], I felt like [13/14 year old me] locked into my purpose in life,” Williams said.

What went unspoken here, in the interview, was the fact that Williams would’ve met Josh Farro, other founding member of Paramore and Zac’s brother, at the same time as she met Zac. Josh wasn’t mentioned by Williams in her interview because of his and Zac’s storied history with the band. The brothers were part of Paramore’s starting line up, along with Williams and then-bassist Jeremy Davis. The brothers initially departed Paramore as a duo in 2010, releasing a joint blog post about their exact grievances with the group, naming issues like the band being controlled by Hayley’s team and family, the band had been manufactured by the record label, and that the lyrical content of the band’s music no longer matched their religious values. However, in 2017, Zac returned to the band as drummer for their fifth studio album, After Laughter. In a tweet he posted to his Twitter back in 2020, Zac said this about his initial departure, and the blog post posted to their blog following their departure. “When my brother and I left Paramore in 2010, there was a post about the band that I did not fully condone. My name was included on the post yes, but I had not been briefed on what the entirety of that message contained,” he posted via Notes App screen shot. This rejoining seemed to have been the best for everyone involved: Paramore became a three person band of Williams, Farro, and guitarist Taylor who joined the band in 2007. The rejoining marked the beginning of Paramore holding a steady line up of members for more than one album cycle.

But, to get back on topic, being in a band was not something that the record labels initially wanted Williams to do. In 2003, at just 15 or 16 years old, Williams signed a deal with Atlantic records by herself, without any band. She was scouted at the height of the Avril Lavigne boom, the signing of her contract coming the year after Lavigne’s first album Let Go that featured hits like Complicated and Sk8er Boi. While Williams initially recorded a few solo demos for Atlantic Records, she ultimately fought against the label to be able to have the artists be Paramore, not just Hayley Williams. Through sheer stubbornness and the bullheadedness of being a kid as she credits it, she was able to convince Atlantic to let just her become Paramore.

Williams was 15 years into her career before she released a solo album. In interviews, she talks about how early in her career, she was very singled out by misogyny for being a woman in her scene. She discusses being harassed for being a girl at the time, and how she learned to keep her head down and not engage with creeps. She also talks about being worried that a solo career would detract from the band. But, seeing Zac Farro go off and do his own thing and not have it be a big deal was a huge inspiration for her. Ultimately, her first album, Petals For Armor, was released in 2020.

That brings us to now, 2026, some nine months after the first iteration of Williams’ third solo album, Ego Death At A Bachelorette Party, was released. The album has been re-released twice, gained three songs, been nominated for a couple Grammys, and had its subsequent tour announced (which I’m hoping desperately that I can go to.) It’s also become easily one of my top albums of the last year. Ego Death At A Bachelorette Party is a personal, existential, mature album that tackles themes of existentialism, break ups, mental health, and growing up. In an Interview with The Face magazine, Williams said this about the album’s creation: "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.” She’s moving onwards and upwards.

Ego Death At A Bachelorette Party’s opener is a song called Ice In My OJ. The song’s stand out lyrics are the repeated chorus of, ‘I’m in a band, I’m in a band.’ These words are wailed frantically through a distorted microphone. Williams is insisting that she’s in a band. She knows it. She wants it. Can she convince you? Coinciding with this whole album, but I feel it particularly this song, Williams released merch of shirts that read, ‘Hayley Williams is my favorite band.’ Her whole life people have been trying to pull her away from Paramore, or Paramore away from her, so it’s nice to see her be able to laugh about it in this way. This song serves the purpose of a thesis statement for the rest of the project; it’s the perfect album opener.

From there, the songs seem to follow two major themes: Hayley’s mental health, and her losing the love of a relationship. The songs that follow her mental health are tracks like Glum and Mirtazapine. Glum, the second track on the album, is an existential look at loneliness. The album has a wistful and tinny quality to it that makes it feel really sentimental and sad. ‘Do you ever feel so alone / That you could implode and no one would know?’ Hayley questions on the songs chorus. Mirtazapine is an energetic rock love letter to the pills that Hayley takes: Mirtazapine, an anti-depressant. ‘Mirtazapine / You make me eat, you make me sleep,’ she sings. She refers to her medication as ‘...[her] genie in a screw cap bottle.’ Another fantastic song that follows this through line of processing emotion is Negative Self Talk, one of my favorite tracks on the album. The song’s instrumental ebbs and flows: its dreamy and easy in a really nice way. ‘Negative self-talk / A veteran, self-taught / Et cetera, on and on / I'm sick of hearing myself talk,’ Hayley chants on the chorus.

In the other category of songs on this album, the break up songs, are some really incredible, more upbeat narratives of various situations that happened while Williams was with this person she seems to have loved and lost. On Parachute, a punchy and dynamic standout from the album, Williams uses the motif of falling to symbolize feeling blind sided in a break up. ‘Tell me, what was the moment you decided to give up? / You could've told me what you wanted, I would've done, I would've done / Anything, I would've done anything,’ she sings at the end of the second verse. On Good Ol’ Days, arguably the album’s most fun song, Williams reminisces on the ‘good ol’ days’ of her relationship where her and her partner were still together. In the song’s first verse, Williams asks, ‘Skinny divorcé, do you regret me? / I'm thinking maybe / Should we go back? Stay friends? / Keep all the benefits?’ She toys with the thought of what it would like for her and her ex to rekindle what they had. ‘Secret love / Secret love,’ she sing-songs as the song fades out, giving way to the next track. An underrated track on the album, in my opinion, is Dream Girl In Shibuya. The song is repetitive and looping. It’s dreamy and mid-tempo like many of the songs on the album, but Williams’ soaring vocals improve this song just that much more.

And, while most of the album adheres to these two major themes, there are still outliers. Namely, True Believer, an exorcism of Williams’ feelings about her home of the south, and Ego Death At A Bachelorette Party, the album’s title track. True Believer is an incredible song. When asked what the lyrics she’s proudest of on the album, Williams answered with the second verse and the pre-chorus of this song. On the second verse she sings, ‘They put up chain-link fences underneath the biggest bridges / They pose in Christmas cards with guns as big as all their children / They say that Jesus is the way, but then they gave him a white face / So they don't have to pray to someone they deem lesser than them.’ Williams has talked a lot about her own evangelical upbringing, and the work she’s had to do to unlearn that. This song talks about what religion and the racism of the South corrupted her view of it. ‘The South will not rise again / 'Til it's paid for every sin / Strange fruit, hard bargain / Till the roots, Southern Gotham.’ The ‘strange fruit, hard bargain’ line is from Billie Holiday’s infamous Strange Fruit, a protest poem and then song against the lynchings of Black people. On the other hand, Ego Death, the album’s title track, tackles fame and a loss of self-worth. The song opens with the lyrics, ‘I'll be the biggest star at this racist country singer’s bar / No use shootin' for the moon, no use chasing waterfalls.’ Williams is talking about losing her ambition amidst fame, while simultaneously calling out racist country singers. About these particular lyrics, on Popcast Williams said, “It could be [about] a couple [people] but I’m always talking about Morgan Wallen I don’t give a shit. Find me at Whole Foods bitch, I don’t care.”

All in all, Ego Death is an incredible album. Williams beautifully and precisely communicates her feelings without betraying the privacy she maintains for herself. I’m excited to see what she does next, and what Paramore does next. Just because we’ve gotten another Hayley Williams album doesn’t mean that there won’t be anymore Paramore albums. The band is just on a break, Williams confirmed on Popcast. She had something to say, and it wasn’t time for another Paramore record, so she let the feelings out solo. They’ll be back at some point, just not now. “Paramore’s not ever going away. If I woke up tomorrow and hated it, and was like ‘fuck Paramore-‘ it’s not going away.” Williams said. “But it’s my favorite band.”