Williams’s voice has never sounded more powerful or elastic than it does today. Most satisfyingly, the latent R&B that’s always trickled through Paramore’s songbook has finally surfaced and bloomed. Over the new album’s 17 tracks, the trio negotiates a fresh reconciliation between rock crunch, emo bluster, R&B verve and pop gloss that should make Pink, Kelly Clarkson and Fall Out Boy all grind their molars. “We have a better relationship with each other than ever and we’re more open to ideas, and trying things, and taking ourselves outside of the past.” If something feels genuine to us, we’ll do it.”Īs a three-piece band - live, they play with an auxiliary guitarist, a keyboardist and a drummer - there’s been less creative congestion and a galvanizing sense of freedom. “I don’t know if we’re aware of our boundaries at this moment. “I was constantly surprised by all the things we were getting away with,” Williams says of the band’s slog in the studio. With guidance from producer Justin Meldal-Johnsen, former bassist for Nine Inch Nails and Beck, the band has gone chasing after new textures and new tempos with no fear. Williams, Davis and York insist that idea was never in play, and three years later, they have the best Paramore album ever recorded to prove it. This all came a year after Williams threw her pipes into Atlanta rapper B.o.B.’s otherwise dishwater radio hit “ Airplanes.” As the tune floated up the Billboard singles chart, fans wondered whether the singer was branding herself as a solo artist. The angst was underscored by the fact that Williams was the only one in Paramore technically signed to Atlantic Records. “In reality, what started as natural somehow morphed into a manufactured product of a major label, riding on the coattails of ‘Hayley’s dream,’” Farro blogged. She doesn’t mention the blog post where Josh Farro - whom Williams was dating when the band’s 2007 album, “Riot,” was on its way to platinum certification - accused his ex-girlfriend of compromising the band’s quiet Christian beliefs and letting her family meddle in Paramore’s dynamic. Williams has used this high-road party line in just about every interview since the split. And you can’t fault someone for not being happy or for finding complete joy in the same things that you do.” “And ended up not wanting it as much as they thought they did. “We all started a band as kids because we really just wanted to be in a band,” Williams says. Williams, 24, wears her orange hair in a Dutch crown braid, looking more like a sprite than the punk who joined Paramore in Franklin, Tenn., a decade ago. Backstage, the three huddle on a tufted sofa. It’s six hours before showtime in Austin - a midnight showcase at the South By Southwest music festival designed to reintroduce Paramore to the industry, the media, the fans, the universe. “Even if I tried, I could never not have this coursing through my veins,” says Williams of the band she joined at 14.
The band’s vivacious new self-titled album, out Tuesday, finds the trio dusting each other off, talking a little trash and strutting into a brilliant, technicolor sunset. But Paramore’s remaining members say they never considered shutting the whole thing down.
This was a group that could turn its inner dramas into singalongs with the piquancy of Fleetwood Mac and the efficiency of Black Flag. Watching the breach play out on a computer screen was both sad and strange. And then they blogged about it, entering an ugly crossfire of keystrokes with Williams, guitarist Taylor York and bassist Jeremy Davis. In 2010, it finally became too much for Josh and Zac Farro, two brothers who founded the band. Williams memorialized her band’s squabbles in more than a few lung-emptying refrains, giving rapacious young fans a front row seat to the band’s spiraling soap opera. The platinum-selling group first wrote its name in the sky in the mid-aughts with rock songs that felt brash and spontaneous, bursting into existence like arguments. Her band mates roar along, wearing denim mottled with rainbow splotches, like the Clash after a day of paintball.īut Paramore is emerging from a much messier war. Gatorade hairdo blow-dried into feathery thistles, Hayley Williams twirls around the stage like some punk rock bird of paradise, punching ghosts, spitting flame.