THE EMO INSTIGATOR - Hayley Williams

Hayley Williams Never Thought She’d Be a Solo Artist—Even As She Was Blamed for Breaking Up Her Own Band

- EVE BARLOW

WHEN HAYLEY WILLIAMS started the pop-punk group Paramore at 15, all she wanted was to be in a band with her best guy friends. And for a while, that’s what she did. But as she grew into an icon for emo kids, releasing platinum albums with her band, Paramore was disintegrating. The narrative circulated by former bandmate Josh Farro, and favored by music trades, was that Williams was a domineering leader. “I could have had a dick and the story wouldn’t have gotten any traction,” Williams, now 31, said. Farro and his brother Zac left the band in 2010, and over the years Paramore went through multiple member changes. After a tour in 2018, Williams decided that she, too, needed a break. She was going through a divorce, and her depression had become unmanageable. She admitted herself to an intensive therapy clinic. And in 2019, she began writing the thing she swore she never would: a solo album, Petals for Armor, released in three parts.

Over Skype, Williams is beneath a weighted blanket; her dog, Alf, is goading her for attention. “Welcome to my bed,” she says, smiling. “It usually takes more than a couple meetings before I get someone in here.”

Paramore is almost two decades old. In those early days, you were always the only female in male spaces.

I did not know how toxic that world could be. The first time we got offered Warped Tour [in 2005], I’d been waiting. The guys and I didn’t listen to pop-punk [at that point]. We wanted to be darker. We wrote “Pressure,” and that was it—we were gonna write emo bops! Sick! I’m psyched that happened. But suddenly the type of attention we were getting was different.

The Warped world?