Paramore's Hayley Williams, Taylor York, Zac Farro talk This Is Why

Publish date: 2024-06-27

Paramore are getting comfy. The trio — singer Hayley Williams, guitarist Taylor York, and drummer Zac Farro — is sitting in front of a fireplace on a rare gloomy afternoon in Los Angeles in early December, the guys sporting cozy beanies while Williams curls up on a leather armchair. The current vibe is "sleepy," York apologizes with a laugh, due to the unseasonable rain, but the conversation that follows is anything but as the pop-punk musicians open up about why they're finally returning with their first new music together in five years.

This Is Why (out Feb. 10), the Grammy-winning group's sixth studio album, represents the long-awaited comeback of Paramore proper. In the years since their last album, 2017's After Laughter, both Williams and Farro released music from each of their side projects (with York producing Williams'), but this is the band's first album post-pandemic, and amid the current mainstream resurgence of emo music. Both longtime fans and newcomers who discovered Paramore's iconic discography during their hiatus may be assuming the album is a return to their roots in an attempt to profit off of pop culture's recent celebration of the pop-punk genre. But they're unapologetically trying something new instead with the raw, political, and ultimately cathartic songs. "We are not usually a band to go backwards, ever," Williams tells EW. "We like to be careful about getting stuck in the past."

The most obvious way This Is Why is firmly anchored in the present is the way in which Williams delivers scathing, brutally honest lyrics inspired by the way the world has changed during their five-year hiatus, like in "The News" ("Shut your eyes / but it won't go away") and "You First" ("Karma's gonna come for all of us / and I just hope she comes for you first"). All three members of Paramore were fed up with watching the way society seemed to be crumbling around them and feeling like they couldn't do anything to stop it.

"It's our most political album in the sense that, I would expect or I would hope, any single person can find something that they fully understand that they're directly impacted by when it comes to social politics or otherwise," Williams says. "And I don't think that you should have to be a minority or a marginalized person to have enough empathy to see it and to not only see it, but to try and figure out what the step is that you should take. Doing that type of soul searching and also paying enough attention, it just naturally brings up a lot in a person. I know for us it has over the last four years, and we've talked about it ad nauseam to the point of exhaustion where it feels like you almost become apathetic from realizing how far down deep the rabbit hole goes."

When they channeled those frustrated, rage-fueled feelings into these 10 new songs, they weren't surprised to see the way it all took shape. "The album explores more than just the surface level of that tension," Williams says. "I tried lyrically to express what was going on internally for me as a human being living on this Earth in this time. The album reflects something of what all of us are experiencing currently and the anxiety of it. But there's also the hope that our album and, of course, our shows can be a wonderful release for people, an escape or a shelter from what's happening. It's balancing the acknowledgement and acceptance of s--- is not okay and something needs to be done, and then also having a five-minute time out every now and then just to give yourself the opportunity to recharge and protect your energy."

The band members stress that finding that balance is the most important thing, because it's something they each had to learn themselves. "It's hard to care about anything now without caring about everything, and it is very tiring to care about everything," Williams explains. "But that's just where we're at. We all really feel for young people that are coming up and coming of age in this world as we know it, because if I'm overwhelmed as an almost 34-year-old woman, I can't imagine. We're just trying to reflect that and also speak to it from a position of we know that we can't fix everything, but we still want to speak to it. We still want to show solidarity and try to use our platform and our opportunities to make some sort of change, whether it's a big one or a little change."

As with all musicians during the pandemic, having to stay home for an extended period of time during the 2020 lockdown also had a profound impact on the band. "The entire world went through a traumatic season that we're still in and recovering from and trying to figure out," York says. "The world shutting down — gosh, we've learned a lot and we all went through a lot. That's why this record, there's a lot more aggression than we've had in a while. There's different types of an emotional release in certain songs that I don't think we've had in a little bit. A lot of that was a product of the times, and not only trying to reflect on what had happened, but also taking that long of a break, we were able to rediscover different sides of ourselves musically that was fun to dive into."

Williams laughs as she thinks back to how quarantining at home was the most "normal" they've all felt since they were literal teenagers when the band formed in 2004. "It was probably time to get to know ourselves as adult human people and figure out other things, because we put all of our 10 thousand hours into Paramore from junior high on," Williams says. "Our 'normal' had always been this really fast-paced centrifugal force that propelled us forward all the time — this is what you do, you write and you exorcise all these demons creatively and then you put it out and then you spend a year or two on the road and get really exhausted doing that. At a certain point, you get tired of the pendulum swinging from extreme to extreme. It was like, let's get to know ourselves away from Paramore. Being isolated was really tough, but I learned a lot about myself."

Going from grueling tour schedules, living on the road, performing every night in a different city, to all of a sudden living in the stillness of regular home life was an abrupt but necessary change for all three members of the band. "It was getting comfortable with the discomfort of our own presence, being alone, relying on more than just the privileged position of Paramore ... and, for me, just being a sister and a daughter was first before being the singer of Paramore, for the first time in my adult life," Williams explains. "We all got healthy doses of all those big and small life lessons from that."

So when Paramore finally sat down to work on the new album after so much had changed — for the world, politically and socially, and for the band, personally — the music poured of them faster than they expected. The last song on the record, the introspective "Thick Skull," was written almost entirely on their first day back together, which shocked them all.

"We were all eager to see how we were going to approach this new album because it was the first time the three of us had really started anything together," Farro says. "There was a song that was about halfway thought out between Taylor and Hayley, and I think me coming in and having a fresh perspective on, or having really no context of it — I just threw out some ideas, we'll just dive in and see what happens, and it was a domino effect from there. It wasn't effortless the rest of the way, but it set the precedent of we can all rely on each other when we get stuck at a certain point."

"It was such a cool way to start the album writing process," Williams says. "It doesn't necessarily sound like every other song on the record, but that song is a beautiful picture of so much music that we were inspired by for the last 20 years. It's a warmer song than we had been known for in the past, and reminded me of when we all first met, listening to A Rush of Blood to the Head by Coldplay, Isola by Kent, Radiohead, Deftones. It's just some really melodic but still heavy hitting moments and rock music that we love."

That first day's success also served as the confirmation the band needed that it was time to bring Paramore back. "We got bored of not doing it," Williams admits with a laugh while York adds, "It was very simple. It wasn't anything other than that."

And they're not planning on getting bored with Paramore anytime soon. While This Is Why concludes their original record label contract, they're not going to stop making new music — regardless of whatever label they end up at in the future. "We're going to be free agents if you want to sign us to your label," Williams jokes. Adds Farro, "We'll probably always make music whether people listen to it or not."

"As long as we stay healthy and people continue to want to hear what we have to make and go to shows, then all eyes are just set on continuing," York says. "We're on the ride. We don't really genuinely get to decide what happens with our career — it's the fans."

Ultimately, they hope the fans are ready for this new era of Paramore. "We came back to it with a whole different perspective and, honestly, just healthier," Williams says. "We just want to be able to really enjoy this and be present and not treat it like it's just what we do, but feel like we're really choosing to do it. Because why not?" This is why, indeed.

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