In 2007, Paramore released their breakthrough hit, Misery Business. It’s a song the band have a complicated relationship with. A few years ago, singer Hayley Williams began offering caveats about it – “I haven’t related to it in a very long time”, “I wrote it … because I was a dick”, “let’s celebrate that we’ve all done a lot of growing up since then” – then, for a period, declined to perform it at all. She made an exception for a guest appearance at Coachella with Billie Eilish, and Paramore returned the song to their sets last year, after four years not playing it. A song that tears vicious strips off a love rival, Misery Business has been dismissed by Williams as an example of “internalised misogyny”.
It’s definitely a potent expression of raw, unfiltered teenage bile – the kind of emotion that feels all-consuming at the time, but which makes you wince when you recall it years later – and its increasingly troubled position within Paramore’s oeuvre is a perfect example of the difficulties that can face artists who grow up in public. You might not have expected a combustible band who made their name with temper tantrums such as Misery Business to last long, but they’re still here, still filling stadiums, godparents to a younger generation of angsty singer-songwriters.
Their sixth studio album demonstrates why. It offers another slight shift in musical direction. Following its predecessor After Laughter’s diversion from pop punk to vibrant synth pop, This Is Why stirs 00s alt-rock into the mix: the band have mentioned Bloc Party and Foals as influences. It’s not a combination that works without fail: there are tracks where the teaming of scratchy guitars and big pop hooks recalls the moment when the post-punk sound of 00s indie crashed into a Britpop-ish desire to make the BBC Radio 1 A-list, with irksome results – particularly on the single C’est Comme Ça.
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But you’re far more frequently struck by the deftness with which they weave the various aspects of their sound together: the agitated drumming and angular guitars meld with the big riffs and stop-start dynamics of pop-punk and an acute understanding of pop songcraft. The last doesn’t just express itself melodically. Liar is a lovely exhalation of a song and fairly obviously about Williams’ romantic relationship with the band’s guitarist, Taylor York – complete with lyrical reference to Williams’ solo track Crystal Clear, a song already picked over for inferences about said relationship by fans. If you think that’s a little odd – a heartfelt song about your deepest emotions with a line thrown in to stimulate discussion on message boards and social media – well, it’s very now. We live in a pop world shaped by Taylor Swift and her plethora of You’re So Vain-ish songs about famous exes, as evidenced by Miley Cyrus’ No 1 single Flowers and Shakira’s Gerard Piqué-bashing, YouTube-breaking Bzrp Music Sessions, Vol 53.
Elsewhere, there are songs about the polarisation of online discourse and the detrimental impact of 24-hour news, but the subject that dominates This Is Why is a distinctly late 20s/thirtysomething brand of angst: “My social life – a chiropractic appointment,” intones Williams at one juncture. Said angst’s various facets are picked over across a succession of tracks.
On Running Out of Time, Paramore evoke the sudden realisation that your time on Earth might not be as limitless as you once thought, and the fear that you’ve become a grownup without developing the skills to cope with adult life. Williams undercuts a succession of excuses with the blunt query: “What if I’m just a selfish prick?”
The creeping feeling that unbridled hedonism isn’t quite the sweet, consequence-free salve for your woes it once seemed to be haunts You First (“I can’t shake the devil off my shoulder”) while Crave works itself into a state about an inability to live in the moment. Eventually, Williams ends up pining for the days when the band could spit out a song like Misery Business without a second thought – “when all it took to make me cry was being alive”. Even the character assassination of Big Man, Little Dignity – “you have no integrity!” – is underscored by a weird envy at the apparent facility with which its subject lives his life.
This Is Why tackles millennial malaise really well and realistically: if your late 20s and early 30s are some way behind you, you still recognise the emotions it describes, while if you spent your teens howling along to Misery Business, it’s all likely to feel terribly pertinent. The second point is key. Growing up with your fans is not an easy thing to do: artists frequently end trapped at the point in their careers where they had their biggest success, offering a welcome burst of nostalgia for which fans endure a few new songs as payment. You would never say Paramore are maturing with ease – their business is anxieties and worries, after all – but they’re definitely doing it.
This week Alexis listened to
Nightbus – Way Past Three
Atmospheric, a little XX-esque, Way Past Three perfectly conjures up the eeriness of the world outside as you leave a party in the small hours.