Hayley Williams’ “Ego Death at a Bachelorette Party” and the mystery of Paramore

How much starpower and confidence do you need to open the title track of your album with the lines, “I’ll be the biggest star / At this racist country singer’s bar”? Starpower and confidence is a hard thing to measure, and many couldn’t pull it off, but Hayley Williams has undoubtedly earnt it all. 

Williams is one of the most successful musicians in history – that is undeniable. As the front-woman of Paramore, she has ‘permanently altered the pop-punk landscape’, as Pitchfork puts it. The band has been releasing Grammy-nominated albums for the past 20 years (despite Williams only being a young 36). But, notably, these years were spent alongside bandmates Zac Farro and Taylor York (as well as Josh Farro and Jeremy Davis – both of which left the band in the early 2010s). As Williams told The Face, Paramore “always take huge breaks […] it takes the amount of time it takes between albums.” However, Paramore’s current break seems a bit different. Now, Williams seems to be assuredly solo. It’s her third solo album, but her first time touring without Paramore and releasing a record with no songwriting or musical collaboration with Farro or York, who both contributed to her first two solo records. Williams’ new album, Ego Death at a Bachelorette Party, is, in short, a solo, bold masterpiece, and listening to it, you feel that Williams has finally come into her own confident self.

To fully appreciate the brilliance of this album, it’s necessary to backtrack a bit and consider Williams’ band, Paramore – who have a tricky history. The band formed in 2004 in Franklin, Tennessee, with three other members besides Williams: Zac Farro, Josh Farro and Jeremy Davis. At the time of the band’s foundation, Williams was also being signed to Atlantic Records and though the label wanted her as a solo artist, she fought for the band to be included. Atlantic apparently scouted Williams to be a ‘pop princess’, though she pushed back, telling the label she’d prefer to make music with her scrappy emo band from school. This led to Williams – at only 15-years-old, when she couldn’t even get her driver’s licence – signing a 20-year-long “360 contract” with Atlantic, meaning the label would profit off all aspects of Paramore and Williams’ work (touring, merchandise, music sales, etc.). 

This highly exploitative deal is referenced throughout Ego Death of a Bachelorette Party, though Williams most directly takes target at it on her first track, ‘Ice in my OJ’, which is nothing if not a victorious way to start her first album since her departure from Atlantic Records. Williams mixes floating lyrics (“Floating on your love like a butterfly”), which were taken directly from her only album before her deal with Atlantic Records, and visceral, spitting rage (her constant refrain is “I’m in a band!”) – all of this implies Williams is reflecting far into her past and into the future, considering who she was before the Atlantic deal and who she can now become, beyond the deal. Notably, Williams decided to release her album under her own ironically-named independent imprint, “Post Atlantic”.

What follows this triumphant opening track is possibly one of my favourite songs of the album, ‘Glum’. There’s a line in When Harry Met Sally, where Harry considers if Sally will die a ‘New York Death where nobody even notices for two weeks until the smell drifts out into the hallway’. This is precisely what I’ve been considering since I moved out of my parents’ house and into London, and coincidentally, Williams is also wondering this on ‘Glum’, when she asks, “Do you ever feel so alone that you could implode and no one would know?” ‘Glum’ is a song of weighty self-reflection and realisation with crushing lyrics, and you can hear Williams’ pain. However, it also has such amazing belted notes and harmonies that you can happily nod along to it while brushing your teeth. This is probably why it was nominated for the Best Rock Song Grammy.  

Rather than a conventional album release, Williams slowly trickled all the songs out to fans, beginning with a password-protected website, where 17 of the 20 singles were accessible as sound bites. Eventually, these 17 standalone tracks came out on streaming platforms, but not as a unified album until three weeks later, leaving fans to create their own tracklist orderings. When the album was finally released, two extra songs were added, and finally, in November, yet another song was added, meaning the final album is twenty songs long.

Two other personal highlights were among these later additions to the album: ‘Good Ol’ Days’ and ‘Parachute’, the latter of which was also nominated for Best Alternative Music Performance at the Grammys. Both songs make clear reference to Williams’ relationship with fellow bandmate, Taylor York, which leads to another fascinating element in the Mythology of Paramore: relationships between bandmates. From the band’s beginning in 2004, Williams was in a relationship with the original lead guitarist, Josh Farro, and after the pair split in 2007, band relationships immediately became terse (Williams recently stated Josh caused the band to miss out on the pivotal end credits song for Jennifer’s Body in 2009, which went to Hole instead). Josh officially parted from the band in 2010, taking his brother, Zac Farro, with him, leaving Paramore without a drummer, and Taylor York took over as lead guitarist. 

What followed for Williams was a long relationship with Chad Gilbert of punk-rock band New Found Glory, who was nearly 8 years her senior. They married in 2016, divorced in 2017, and Williams has since released many songs detailing the issues and trauma that relationship caused her (‘Pool’, ‘Simmer’ and ‘Dead Horse’ among them). This tangential history then ends with Williams’ relationship with Taylor York – it’s unclear when their relationship began, though throughout their tour for This Is Why and their opening slot on Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, they were certainly together. However, with the recent album – and specifically, the following two songs – Williams heavily implies a devastating breakup with York. 

‘Good Ol’ Days’ is fun and poppy, with the lyrics jumping around with the knee-bouncing beat, but the lyrics are heart-breaking and perfectly self-referential: 

In my opinion, this is the highlight of the album: it’s sad, relatable, meaningful and deeply emotional, while also having the same brilliant R&B-inflected pop sound of Paramore’s After Laughter.

‘Parachute’, similarly, had some painfully self-referential lyrics, among its pop-rock magnificence, that allude to her split from York: “You were at my wedding […] You could have told me not to do it”.

Some other brilliant tracks are ‘Love Me Different’, ‘Dream Girl In Shibuya’, ‘Showbiz’ and ‘Negative Self Talk’. Personally, ‘Mirtazapine’ and ‘True Believer’ fell a bit flat in comparison to other songs – though the former was nominated for the Best Rock Performance Grammy, so what do I know?

Overall, the album feels like a freeing triumph for Williams: at long last, she is free from her constraining contract at Atlantic Records, and her fanbase is strong enough that she felt artistically free to experiment with genre and sound. Is it a rock album? Pop? Dream, synth, indie pop, R&B, folk? According to the Grammys, it occupies the vague genre of “alternative” – and nominated for best album in this category – though it is hard to define the album with one singular sound. It roams across all genres and creates a completely new one at once. ‘Dream Girl In Shibuya’ follows the ethereal, soft pop of Japanese Breakfast, while ‘I Won’t Quit On You’ follows similar melancholic acoustic guitar melodies of Williams’ last solo album, FLOWERS for VASES / descansos. ‘Whim’ is pure, hopeful pop, while ‘Hard’ is cynical bass guitar rock. 

Ego Death at a Bachelorette Party is a celebration of freedom and fearlessness. As she says at the end of ‘Parachute’, we are watching Hayley Williams fly.

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