Paramore has been a band for more than two decades, during which time more than a few changes altered the course of their trajectory. Still, Hayley Williams and bandmates Zac Farro and Taylor York have always found their way back to each other in one way or another. For the past few years, they’ve had a really good thing going. In 2023, they released This Is Why, the first Paramore album to feature the same lineup as the one that preceded it. Their track record is improving, but their fans are still scared that they’ll call it quits at any given moment.
Fresh off the release of her latest solo album Ego Death at a Bachelorette Party, Williams is reassuring them that Paramore isn’t going anywhere. “Do we ever know where we’re at?!” the front woman recently told The Face. “We always take huge breaks. In order for us to metabolize shit that we go through as people, it takes the amount of time it takes between albums.” The magazine reports that Williams confirmed that the band is on a break, but has not broken up.
Since 2009, at least four years passed between Paramore albums, and at most five years, which was the case for the gap between After Laughter and This Is Why. It has only been two and a half years since the LP, which was also toured significantly.
“There are no better musicians in the world than Zac and Taylor,” Williams continued. “I feel such a vindication in knowing that nobody can discount Paramore. But it’s also really important for me to strengthen other muscles and these parts of myself that I deflated because I was scared that people were going to notice me too much.”
Ego Death at a Bachelorette Party arrived in the form of a cryptic, password-protected website upload on July 28 before being officially released on Aug. 1. Less than two weeks prior, Farro released his latest solo album, Operator. Still, it was Williams’ release that was more throughly dissected for evidence that Paramore had once again fallen apart. It didn’t seem to matter much that the first song on the official Ego Death at a Bachelorette Party track list, “Ice in my OJ,” features the singer-songwriter chanting: “I’m in a band, I’m in a band,” and the final song is titled “I Won’t Quit on You.”
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Williams told The Face that “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.” In 2024, Paramore reached the end of their 20-year recording contract with Atlantic Records.
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“For everything we’ve been through, it almost feels like as soon as Zac rejoined the band after six years of being away from us, not only did we get our guy back, we got ourselves back,” Williams told Rolling Stone in 2023. “We got a part of our childhood back. This thing that made us who we were, we got it back. And it’s such a superpower when we’re together.”
In that conversation, Williams also noted that the band was “getting really excited about making new music again,” but added, “There’s something that we all are metabolizing finally, about the last few years of the band, but also existing. There’s a lot of lessons that have sat on the surface. But I think that now there’s things that are sinking in that couldn’t have before. I’m excited that we can actually go forward knowing more, or being more than you were before. I’m ready for that and I feel it.”
