Twenty years ago, Hayley Williams was a naive if precocious homeschooled teenager and a devout Christian who had just signed to a major label, first as a solo act and then as the singer of Paramore. Now, she is a 34-year-old divorcée, a fierce advocate for abortion access, and a role model and formative influence for a new generation of pop stars. She has been famous for more than half her life, a position that can both foist premature adulthood on teen idols and shield them against the outside world. Paramore’s sixth album, This Is Why, trembles with the paranoid anxieties of a grown woman peering outside her bubble: a bit out of step, a bit pollyanna, but all the more furious at the status quo.
In the five years since Paramore’s last album, After Laughter, the jagged, sinister sound the band carved out on their earliest records has returned in the poison-laced anthems of artists like Olivia Rodrigo and Willow. Meanwhile, on a pair of solo albums, Williams brought in collaborators including boygenius and experimented with softer, more intimate production. As she reunites with bandmates Zac Farro and Taylor York, Paramore seem reluctant to retread their old rhythms: “We don’t want to be a nostalgia band,” Williams said last month. Instead of regurgitating the gnarled mall punk of their previous records, on This Is Why they reach for the propulsive sounds of post-punk. The genre’s wry lyrics and crackling energy hold sentimental meaning for Williams, who grew up on the early 2000s British post-punk revival. “It always reminds me of getting my driving license…Bloc Party’s Silent Alarm was always on in the car,” she said on her podcast last year. Yet in pursuing the sounds of their youth, Paramore lose the exuberance that launched their larger-than-life hooks into the stratosphere.
They’ve pivoted before, to Day-Glo ’80s synth-pop on After Laughter, where Williams’ impassioned frustration was a perfect fit for bright-sounding songs about being mad as hell. This time around, it’s a riskier bet. The barking monotone of Bloc Party and the Rapture is an odd choice for a vocalist with such an arresting range. While the jagged edges of “This Is Why” establish a jittery energy to match Williams’ punctuated belting on the chorus, songs like “C’est Comme Ça” draw too closely from their inspirations. When Williams adopts the flat affectation of Dry Cleaning’s Florence Shaw, she crucially misses the irreverence and quotidian absurdity that make Shaw’s non sequiturs hilarious and commanding. Instead, we’re given schoolyard taunts (“na-na-na-na”) and a summary of Williams’ recent medical history. Williams has masked prosaic lyrics with her booming voice in the past, but without a melody as her guide, she comes across as uninspired. “Getting better is boring,” she sighs. It certainly sounds like it.