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From their loud-and-proud mid-2000s debut all the way to their stint performing with Taylor Swift on her Eras Tour, Paramore’s pop-punk sounds have been a mainstay of the music scene for the last two decades. Songs like ‘Misery Business’, ‘Still Into You’, ‘Hard Times’ and ‘This Is Why’ demonstrate the band’s enduring ability to reinvent themselves and keep us on our toes with excellent tunes. In this essential guide to the band, we’ll celebrate the continued rise of Hayley Williams, Taylor York and Zac Farro, and discover how they have shifted their sound from riotous emo-punk to their new alternative and dance-flavoured tunes. We’ll revisit every album in the back catalogue, relive the group’s defining moments, pay tribute to past members, highlight essential Paramore tracks and much more!…

Hayley Williams, who was around 18 years old during this gig in Los Angeles in 2006, was a confident and charismatic concert performer from an early age. Indeed, by the time Paramore formed and began touring America, she was already a signed artist, writing and recording songs in Nashville, Tennessee. Her label, Atlantic Records, was keen for her to pursue a career as a solo pop artist, but Hayley was adamant that she wanted to play music of the rock or pop-punk persuasion in a band, hence the formation of Paramore. She was 16 when the group’s first album, All We Know Is Falling, was released in 2005 – and although some negative comments from ex-members over the years implied that Paramore was simply a project manufactured around Hayley, we…

Hayley and Josh on the Fuse TV channel’s The Sauce show in May 2007, a month or so before the release of their soon-to-be-successful second album Riot! Their fellow guest on this short-lived music show was Jamey Jasta of the hardcore punk band Hatebreed – a slightly incongruous pairing at first sight, until you remember that the music Paramore were making at this point in their careers was often pretty heavy. Not that there’s any sign of headbanging in this particular image, a friendly snapshot of a singer and her guitarist – the only Paramore six-stringer since the departure of Hunter Lamb – having a bright and breezy chat about their future. Sure, the band had been through some obstacles, an unsympathetic cover feature in a major British magazine in…

Only four musicians, you say? Yes, indeed. By June 2007 – when Paramore, pictured here, appeared alongside the pop singer Lily Allen on The Sauce – Hunter Lamb was no longer a member of the band. Hunter apparently departed as Paramore were about to record the Riot! album, wanting to get married. As the group wrote on their LiveJournal blog: “We have parted ways with our friend and guitarist for the past year Hunter Lamb. We wish Hunter the best in all that he does next and in his engagement and marriage. It was a blessing getting to know him on the road and we were lucky to have him in the band with us… Obviously we’ve been through more than a couple member changes, and we are sure it’s…

Paramore hanging out with the then up-and-coming country singer Taylor Swift at the Grammy Nominee Party in Nashville in January 2008. The band and Taylor Swift were more or less simultaneous in their rise to prominence, being around two years into their professional careers: Hayley Williams is a year or so older than Taylor, who later invited Paramore to open for many dates on her Eras Tour of 2023-24. The pairing might sound unusual given that Paramore were regulars on Warped and other metal and ‘-core’ tours while Taylor occupied country and pop territory, but their respective styles have moved steadily towards the mainstream over the decades, making the support slot a perfectly reasonable concept. Not only that, Taylor and Hayley share a Tennessee background, although the former moved there…

Now you understand why musicians make so many jokes about drummers? Here’s Zac Farro, seated at his kit at the Apollo in Manchester in January 2008. In fairness to drummers, they have a lot of targets to hit, a haircut to maintain and only two sticks to do both jobs with… ah, we’re only kidding. By this point in their career, all the members of Paramore were deft musicians, knowing how to serve a song tastefully without going over the top with technique. Revisit the songs on the two albums – Riot! and Brand New Eyes – between which this shot was taken. Dynamic, energetic and packed full of hooky melodies, Paramore’s early-to-mid-career songs were based squarely on Hayley’s vocal acrobatics and a solid backing from the guys. They soon…

Album charts the world over welcomed Brand New Eyes into their upper reaches in late 2009, keen on Hayley’s compelling performances and image, and persuaded by the catchy, upbeat elements of the singles. Paramore arrived properly with this album, successful as Riot! had undoubtedly been: songs such as ‘Careful’ accelerated quickly into high-adrenaline territory, while ‘Ignorance’ demonstrated heavier‑sounding compositions were still welcome in Paramore’s songbook. A pop-punk workout, ‘Looking Up’, kept older fans happy, an acoustic love song called ‘The Only Exception’ took us into new territory, and songs such as ‘All I Wanted’ were shamelessly aimed at mainstream radio. “Pop hooks and a killer set of pipes can still vault a band to platinum status, economic downturn be damned,” observed Allmusic in their review, nailing this album perfectly. What…

By 2010, some ill-informed news outlets were starting to caption images such as this one as “Hayley Williams and Paramore” – or worse, assuming that her name was actually Paramore and that the dudes were simply her backing band. It didn’t help that shots such as this one – of the band arriving at the Grammy Awards in January 2010 – saw the guys dressed in homogenous dark tones while Hayley rocked her trademark bold colours. Still, we knew the truth: that Paramore were a band, with musical input from all sides. The first year of the 2010s was a packed one for the group, with dates in Australia, Europe and the USA leading up to the Honda Civic tour. There would be some bumps along the way, specifically when…

Taylor York, Hayley Williams and Jeremy Davis at a MusiCares benefit event at Club Nokia in Los Angeles in May 2011. Any concerns fans may have had about the band’s future now that Josh and Zac Farro were no longer involved were swiftly allayed when Paramore promised a new single and EP for release later that year. At the same time, as Taylor York explained to MTV, the new line-up would be taking some time off to make plans – and that they would, by necessity, sound a little different to the way they did when the Farro brothers were on board. “We lost two really big parts of this band, so it’s going to be different, but we’re still Paramore. We’ve all written together before, so it’s not like…

A global smash hit, Paramore’s self-titled fourth album was seized upon by fans keen to know how the group had weathered their last few turbulent years and were rewarded with a set of songs that did exactly that. Across 17 tracks that lasted an hour and more, the band – now a trio, plus genius producer Justin Meldal-Johnsen – blended chart-pop with rock elements for a very digestible sound, including catchy melodies that stayed with you all day once they’d burrowed into your mind. See the electro-tinged ‘Fast In My Car’ and the unforgettable ‘Still Into You’ for evidence, but there’s barely a forgettable track here despite the album’s length. If you’re after a 1990s new jack swing feel, check out ‘Ain’t It Fun’; if you want 1960s vibes, listen…

Another holiday show? Christmas is evidently a big deal on Paramore’s calendar. Here’s Taylor and Hayley on stage at Kiss 108’s Jingle Ball in Boston during December 2013, rocking a slightly more grown-up look, you’ll notice. The ‘Daydreaming’ single had just been released, with ‘Ain’t It Fun’ lined up for February 2014, and Paramore were maximising their promotion with as many tours and one-off dates as possible. Fortunately, the press and fanbase were fully on board with the new Paramore album: Alternative Press called it the band’s best album to date, and USA Today noted that its vibes were generally more positive than earlier works, saying, “Williams’ sarcasm seems less forced than her enthusiasm, still, Paramore shows a band determined to get out of the misery business.” We think that…

Taylor York delivering the riffage at the Wango Tango event at the StubHub Center in LA in May 2014. Born in December 1989 and thus a year younger than his musical and now romantic partner Hayley Williams, he was raised in Nashville and taught the guitar by his father Peter, owner of a gospel record label. His older brother Chris works in artists and repertoire at Capitol Records, making the Yorks quite the music-industry family. Taylor had played in a band with Josh and Zac Farro in the early 2000s before meeting Hayley at a football game: the two became friends, and he took part in some of the songwriting for Paramore’s first album, All We Know Is Falling. He became an official member in 2009 and has been a…

Jeremy Davis playing at the Hangout Music Festival in Alabama in May 2015, around six months before he parted ways with Paramore for the final time. As the remaining two musicians wrote in a statement: “Jeremy is no longer going to be in the band with us. To be honest, this has been really painful. After taking time to consider how to move forward, we ultimately found that we really do believe Paramore can and should continue on. And so we will. We’re really thankful for the people who have helped see us through hard times before and what we’ve discovered is that those people are just as much a part of this as we will ever be. We’re hopeful for Paramore’s future and we’re also excited for what Jeremy’s…

It’s Good Morning America with Zac, Hayley and Taylor at Rumsey Playfield in New York in August 2017. This performance marked the last of Paramore’s summer dates, with a well‑earned rest now taking them into October when they headed towards Latin and South America. The After Laughter album and tour were a resounding success, but behind the scenes, Hayley was dealing with some serious personal issues. She had separated from her husband Chad Gilbert from New Found Glory the month before this image was taken, and divorce was underway, to be resolved at the end of 2017. We are sure no one finds a divorce easy to manage, but imagine going through it when both partners are under public scrutiny and the media is watching their every move. All credit…

Taylor York and Paramore’s touring bassist Joey Howard giving it a dose of serious muso energy at the Harvard Athletic Complex in Boston in May 2018. Joey, who also plays with Hayley Williams on her solo albums, has been performing live with Paramore since 2015. As fans will know, debate has always raged online about which band line-up is the ‘real’ Paramore, with older devotees insisting that the early days with the two Farro brothers and bassist Jeremy Davis represented the group at their best. There’s no correct answer to this debate: everyone has their subjective preferences, and when feelings run high, rational conversation fails. Hayley has discussed some of this in recent years: now that she has close to 20 years in Paramore to look back on, she can…

Paramore’s sixth studio album pulls off the tricky task of combining the group’s old and new sound in a way that didn’t annoy anyone too much, with almost all of its reviews uniformly good. Their new producer, Carlos De La Garza, brought back some of the big guitars that had beefed up so many of Paramore’s earliest songs, and Hayley’s lyrics are often darker and more introspective to suit that sound. But look, this is modern Paramore, so the pop elements are just as strong as ever. ‘The News’ takes a hard look at the modern media, while ‘Thick Skull’ is a haunting piece of analysis and ‘You First’ is an 1980s-style rock workout. ‘Big Man Little Dignity’ takes the pace down a little, atmospherics ooze from ‘Crave’, and ‘C’est…

Paramore on stage at the New Yorker Festival at Webster Hall in NYC on 6 October 2023, with little sign of the stir they were about to cause. On 27 December, the group wiped all their social media, took their website effectively offline, and cancelled a 13 January 2024 slot at the iHeartRadio Alter Ego festival “due to unforeseen circumstances”. After a period of uncertainty and alarm, Paramore posted a reassuring message to Instagram that read: “Now that Paramore has spent the year touring behind This Is Why (and making sure to take better care of themselves while they’re at it), a chapter of the band’s career has come to a close. They’ve now fulfilled all label obligations and are effectively free agents… one thing’s for sure – they’re still…

Backstage in 2006, Paramore make it clear that there’s more than enough attitude to go around – and that’s what any band needs at this early stage: the willingness to take on the world and build a foothold while doing so. All the more credit to them given that, at this stage, the group weren’t yet anywhere near the top of the world. In fact, back in 2006, Paramore were just another band fighting for a way up. Their debut album, All We Know Is Falling, had been a decent success, with sales in the US and worldwide that were promising, if not spectacular, but there was no guarantee of any serious commercial impact in the future. As we know now, that was still a year or two away. What…

Taking the music to the masses in Chicago, Paramore enjoy a moment of eye-to-eye communion with the fans. From left, Josh Farro, Hayley Williams, Zac Farro, Jeremy Davis and Taylor York. The last of these, who joined in 2007 but was friendly with the group beforehand and had songwriting credits on All We Know Is Falling, would go on to play the most crucial role in the band apart from that of Hayley herself. Initially, he played guitar alongside Josh but later took on solo guitar duties, backing vocals and keyboards. The line-up pictured here is one of the last incarnations of Paramore in which five full members hit the stage. Taylor’s brother, Justin, has also toured briefly as a guitarist with the band, making Paramore quite the fraternal outfit…

Paramore, pictured at the 2008 Grammy Awards at the Staples Center in Los Angeles, where the memo of ‘be unironically heavy metal in the photoshoot’ has clearly only been taken seriously by bassist Jeremy Davis. The other three are throwing the horns either politely or humorously. Who knows, perhaps this slightly differing attitude had contributed to Jeremy being booted out not long before the Riot! sessions? As Josh Farro later recalled, “Before recording our next record, we kicked out Jeremy for his lack of work ethic and participation in things that Zac, Hayley and I didn’t agree with.” However, Jeremy was invited back into the fold shortly afterwards, presumably after everyone had agreed to resolve their differences. Anyway, in this image Paramore have every right to be in a party…

Zac, Jeremy, Josh and Hayley cue up backstage at the Apollo in Manchester, England, in January 2008. Note the lack of Jack Daniel’s and groupies in the green room. Never a drugs-and-booze band thanks to their religious convictions, Paramore are typical of many modern rock bands in that the music comes first: you’re unlikely to hear tales of debauchery from any current or even former member. It’s probably just as well: 2008 was set to be a troubled year, with some of the European summer dates postponed while Paramore worked through some internal issues, kickstarted when Josh expressed his annoyance at the media’s emphasis on Hayley rather than the band as a whole. This has been a common complaint since time immemorial from any band whose obvious focal point is…

Paramore pictured at the 2008 MTV Video Music Awards at Paramount Pictures Studios in Los Angeles in September 2008: new guitarist Taylor York appears at the far right. Between legs of the ongoing Riot! tour, the group had recorded a live album, The Final Riot!, which was released a couple of months after this photo was taken, so there was plenty of activity in the Paramore camp. Taylor had added a new perspective to the band, both in and out, with his contributions on the stage and in the studio a valued asset to the team. He’d even played the glockenspiel on the live album’s 12th track, ‘We Are Broken’, an anthem for Generation Z if there ever was one. As time passed and Josh Farro began to consider his…

Here’s a perfect snapshot of a music industry veteran meeting someone she influenced: Gwen Stefani of No Doubt singing with Hayley Williams in July 2009 at Verizon Wireless Amphitheater in Irvine, California. Fully 20 years Hayley’s senior, Gwen had spent the 1990s building the No Doubt brand and adding a successful solo career to that portfolio in the 2000s, but there’s no sign of this difference in experience in this image. Here, the two singers face off with equal confidence and good humour, enjoying the moment and respecting each other’s status. Gwen was the elder of the pair, so to speak, enjoying the middle act of her band’s career with little to fear from the future; Hayley was the hotshot new kid on the music block, hitting the headlines and…

Hayley Williams is pictured enjoying the moment during Paramore’s set on the Main Stage at the UK’s hallowed Reading Festival in August. By this point, she’d established the successful beginnings of a solo career, having written a song called ‘Teenagers’ for the soundtrack of the movie Jennifer’s Body, although she was clear that her future remained with Paramore. Also in 2010, Hayley appeared on two songs – ‘Airplanes’ and ‘Airplanes, Part II’ – on the album B.o.B. Presents: The Adventures Of Bobby Ray, the debut release from the rapper B.o.B. While this might have been dismissed as a fun side project or a favour for a buddy in normal circumstances, the fact that ‘Airplanes’ was released as a single and made the top 10 worldwide made it a huge success…

A ‘mostly acoustic’ performance – given that Jeremy Davis is playing an electric bass guitar – at LA’s Club Nokia in May 2011. At this point, Paramore had recently confirmed that they would be releasing the Singles Club EP in the summer, with the ‘Monster’ single set for release in June in line with that summer’s Transformers: Dark Of The Moon movie, on whose soundtrack it appeared. There would also be a series of Singles Club releases beginning in October and a brand-new studio album on the way in early 2012, meaning that line-up changes or no line-up changes, Paramore were functioning at full strength. “This club is our way of getting these songs directly to the Paramore family,” ran a statement from the band. “We really wanted to do…

Jeremy Davis, Hayley Williams and Taylor York share the stage with actress Pauley Perrette at the Grammy Awards at the Staples Center, Los Angeles, in February 2011. They were jointly presenting the award for Best Rock Album to the band Muse, whose album The Resistance scooped the trophy. Paramore themselves were nominated for the cumbersomely-titled Best Pop Performance By A Duo Or Group With Vocal for their song ‘The Only Exception’ although they lost out to Train’s song ‘Hey, Soul Sister’. They were also named in the Producer Of The Year, Non-Classical category, as the nominee, Rob Cavallo, had produced Brand New Eyes (in the end, that award went to Brian ‘Danger Mouse’ Burton). Oh, and if you don’t know who Pauley Perrette is, she’s best known for the 2000…

Jeremy Davis, Hayley Williams and Taylor York pictured at the Fox Teen Choice Awards 2013 held at the Gibson Amphitheatre in LA on 11 August. Album number four, the self-titled LP, had been released that April, preceded by the singles ‘Now’ and ‘Still Into You’, and by the summer of 2013, Paramore were deep into the press cycle for their new album. The demographic of the group’s audience had evolved over the previous couple of years, with pop teens welcomed into the fold alongside the former legions of emo and alt kids, hence their presence at this teenager-focused event. By the time this photo was taken, the group had completed two full US tours and a European run of dates, and a Latin American jaunt had finished the previous week.…

Hayley Williams making a solo visit to SiriusXM Studios in New York in January 2014. It would be a landmark year for her, personally as well as with Paramore, not least because she was given the first-ever Billboard Trailblazer Award at the annual Billboard Women in Music Awards ceremony in New York later in 2014. “We are pleased to honour her creativity and success,” said Billboard’s Janice Min. “We’ve watched her progress and climb the charts as a soloist and lead singer for several years, and we look forward to seeing what she comes up with next.” Hayley responded, “I can remember a time when I would’ve been made fun of for doing things differently. Now I’m getting an award for it? This is too much. I’m so excited! There…

Hayley Williams, Taylor York and Jeremy Davis after a performance on ABC’s Good Morning America at New York’s Rumsey Playfield in June 2014. Paramore had come a long way in a short time, evidenced by this appearance on one of the USA’s prime morning TV slots – although internal dissent was building in one area of the band, as we’ll see. Hayley was making hay while the sun shone, taking advantage of Paramore’s increasing success in the mainstream to launch a business career. Some months before this image was taken, she partnered with MAC Cosmetics on the design and release of four beauty products – a powder, an eye shadow, lipstick and nail polish. This meant that while fans might not have been able to sing like Hayley or deliver…

Thanks again to producer Justin Meldal-Johnsen, Paramore’s fifth record is an exquisitely crafted, precision-engineered collection of pop tunes that charted highly worldwide. The sound of the 1980s was a weighty influence this time, with the disco‑influenced ‘Hard Times’ and the synth-heavy ‘Told You So’ letting us know exactly where we were headed from the off. Hayley delivers another world-class performance on this album, channelling Annie Lennox on ‘Forgiveness’ and working out her stunning vocal range on ‘Rose‑Colored Boy’, and the rest of the instrumentals seem to have made the transition from pop‑punk to electronic pop with little trouble. The singer seems not to have forgotten her emo past, asking “You think I look all right with these mascara tears?” on ‘Fake Happy’, but look, when an album’s biggest hit is…

Hayley gets down onstage at the KROQ Weenie Roast at StubHub Center in Carson, California, on 20 May 2017. The single ‘Told You So’ had just been released, and had gathered pace among the fans despite its relatively lightweight style: Uproxx described it as a “super fun indie pop-rock tune that borrows from the 80s”, while the NME categorised it as “summer-y electro-pop with a rush of tropical rhythms”. The usually hard-to-impress Pitchfork wrote, “There’s more to ‘Told You So’ than a clever twist on an old phrase. Paramore have faced their share of naysayers as they’ve broadened their sound from its pop-punk origins.” Check out the video, a vivid, possibly Wes Anderson-inspired road-trip clip that was inspired, Hayley explained, by the relaxing car rides the band had taken after…

Hayley reaches out to the crowd at the Bonnaroo Arts And Music Festival in Manchester, Tennessee in June 2018. It was on this run of dates that she announced that the song ‘Misery Business’ would no longer be performed due to a problematic word used in its second verse. Before playing their breakout song for what seemed like the last time in Paramore’s hometown of Nashville on 7 September, she told the audience: “This is a choice we made because we feel like we should. We feel like it’s time to move away from it for a little while… This is to every bad decision that led us here, this is to all the embarrassing things we might have said, but we owned up to it and we grew.” Hayley…

Paramore on the ball at the Bud Light Super Bowl Music Festival at Footprint Center in Phoenix, Arizona, in February 2023. This shot was taken one day before the release of album number six, This Is Why, the return to more guitar-heavy music that many Paramore fans had been craving – although its songs were as stuffed with catchy melodies as ever, explaining its critical acclaim and commercial success. Clash wrote, “It’s a disservice… to call any Paramore album the ‘most’ anything… But something about the songwriting on This Is Why [is] undeniably the most something.” Exclaim! labelled it “a record deeply rooted in post-punk and art punk traditions… Paramore’s most mature release to date”, and the Guardian noted that “the agitated drumming and angular guitars meld with the big…

Young and hungry for the prize, the five members of Paramore – from left, Josh Farro, Hayley Williams, Hunter Lamb, Jeremy Davis and Zac Farro – grab a photo opportunity at the Warped Tour press night in April 2006 at the Key Club in Hollywood. It’s a snapshot of the band as they appeared between the release of All We Know Is Falling in 2005 and their jump to worldwide success with Riot! two years later. Almost 20 years have passed since then, and the band has changed significantly in membership and look since those days: Hunter was gone within a year of this shot, while Josh quit in 2010, and Jeremy left in 2006 but returned in 2007 for an eight-year stint. Many young musicians took a shot at…

Josh, Hunter, Hayley, Zac and Jeremy strike a pose during the Vans Warped Tour at Miami’s Bicentennial Park in June 2006. Sure, it’s easy to roll your eyes at those mid-Noughties hairstyles, but many of us thought this look was super cool back then, didn’t we? Despite the scowls, the future was bright for Paramore at this point, with a sold-out headlining tour about to kick off in August, and the fanbase kept happy with the release of The Summer Tic EP – a stopgap to tide everyone over until the appearance of the next full album. Touring is an exhausting business in the early stages of any band’s career, and Paramore’s was no exception, but they had the tenacity to keep it going while the going was good. The rewards…

Hayley Williams communing with the masses at the UK’s Download Festival in June 2007. The event, held at Donington in the county of Derby since the early 1980s – when it was known as Monsters Of Rock – stands alongside France’s Hellfest and Germany’s Wacken as the world’s biggest hard rock and metal festivals – and as such is a testing ground for any ambitious young band looking to make a mark. On this occasion, Paramore were third on the bill after Korn and Enter Shikari on the second stage, the Dimebag Darrell Stage. Hayley told the crowd: “Donington! How are you feeling? You look absolutely gorgeous. If you’ve stumbled on this tent by accident, we’re Paramore from the United States! This song is about when you feel let down…

Hayley and Jeremy rock the stage in December 2008 at KROQ’s Almost Acoustic Xmas at the Gibson Amphitheatre in Universal City, California. Note the energy and the focus of both performers: even though 2008 had been Paramore’s most challenging year to date, the group was still delivering fully-leaded performances and keeping an eye on the next step up. By this point, writing and recording were in progress for album number three, Brand New Eyes, and the goal was to maintain and improve on the profile that had been made since the Riot! album had made such an impact in 2007. All these years later, we know that Paramore would do exactly that in 2009 and beyond, but at the time, who knows how the future looked and felt? We think…

Hayley Williams in full flow on stage during the Jingle Ball Christmas event, held that year at New York’s prestigious Madison Square Garden in December 2008. The event was a largely pop and R&B music-focused affair, with Lady Gaga, Kanye West, Katy Perry, Brandy, Leona Lewis, Ne-Yo and other stars of the day doing their thing. Indeed, Paramore were something of a breath of fresh air at the event, where guitar bands were few and far between: it’s interesting to note that they fitted in well with the demographic of the viewership, made up of young music fans for whom rock, pop and R&B could happily occupy a similar space. On the night, Paramore delivered a raucous version of the hit song ‘Misery Business’, a composition with which Hayley admitted…

Josh Farro, seen here on the curiously-named but credible Honda Civic Tour at the HP Pavilion in San Jose, California in 2010, his last year with Paramore. During his four years with the band, he was integral to their sound and songwriting, laying down guitar riffs and standing out on stage for his committed performance. However, as time passed, he and his brother Zac were evidently finding it difficult to square their steadfast Christian beliefs with the changing direction of the band. As he explained in a blog post at the end of 2010, he was also struggling with the setup of the group, which – he alleged – was essentially run by Hayley Williams and her management. In the spring of the same year, he missed a Paramore tour…

Is it us, or does Hayley Williams look embarrassed by rapper B.o.B.’s dad-dancing? Here, they are performing at the 2010 MTV Video Music Awards in Los Angeles, synthesising rock and hip‑hop music for the audience. B.o.B., or Bobby Ray Simmons to his accountant, was hot stuff at the time, having enjoyed his first hits in 2009 and benefiting hugely from Hayley’s guest vocals on his super-catchy single ‘Airplanes’ the following year. He sustained this momentum for another seven years or so, with high points including a guest slot on one of his singles by none other than Taylor Swift, but his profile declined as fans moved on to newer artists. Later still, he blew it completely by espousing flat‑Earth beliefs, claiming that the 9/11 attacks were a hoax and making…

Hayley owns the stage at the Reading Festival in August 2012. Always a confident performer, even in front of the largest crowds, she had to learn the hard way how to command an audience’s respect. As she once told The Fader, Paramore’s early shows on tours such as Warped showed her how it was done: “It was my high school. We learned how to connect to people from a stage… By halfway through, there were girls showing up with hair like mine.” She also recalled a moment when, supporting the nu metal band Korn in Germany in 2007, she picked up a plastic bottle from the stage and threw it at the crowd, assuming it had been thrown at her. It turned out just to be the usual on-stage litter,…

Hayley demonstrates the tricky ‘simultaneous sing and headbang’ move on stage at the Pinkpop festival in Landgraaf, Holland in June 2013 – at this point, Paramore was halfway through a solid year of touring. Along the way, Hayley had found time to record a guest vocal for the electronic dance music artist Zedd on a song called ‘Stay The Night’ – relevant here because it was a massive hit on its release in September this year. This meant that her profile was doubly high in 2013, partly because of Paramore’s extensive world touring, but also because ‘Stay The Night’ was inescapable, dominating nightclubs with its perfect summer vibes. The song gave Hayley her first solo number one, technically speaking, as it topped the Billboard Dance Mix/Show Airplay chart and entered…

Could you handle the pressure of being invited on stage by Hayley Williams to perform with Paramore – especially on one of their biggest hits, ‘Misery Business’? This fan evidently could, when Hayley gave her the nod to come up and duet at the StubHub Center in Los Angeles in May 2014, but only just. This can be a life-changing experience for many fans: as a gig-goer called Macayla Smith wrote after her own ‘Misery Business’ duet in Atlanta in 2022, “I’ve been a Paramore fan since at least 11 years old… I never thought that I would actually get chosen to sing along with Paramore. [Their] art helps us get through our own struggles and hard times. One of the reasons I love Paramore’s music so deeply is because…

The Paramore trio, pictured at the iHeart Radio Music Festival at the MGM Grand Resort in Las Vegas in September 2014. Questions were coming their way about a potential follow-up to the acclaimed self-titled album, but as Hayley told Billboard – who labelled their set “one of the best performances of the 2014 iHeartRadio Music Festival” – the band were in no hurry. “We’re in the dreaming‑up stage, and figuring out kind of who we want to be next,” she explained. “I think we’re getting there. We haven’t written anything that we’ve loved and thought, ‘This is it, this is the new direction,’ or where we want to be, or who we are. But it’ll happen… I know we’re gonna make a great record when the time is right, but…

Hayley delivers an energetic performance on stage at London’s Royal Albert Hall. Paramore’s After Laughter album had been released the previous month and was reaping serious praise in the press, although not all of it was wholly accurate: for example, the New York Times noted that “Ms Williams and her bandmates Zac Farro and Taylor York have remade themselves into a 1980s pop-rock outfit”. Pop-rock, sure; 1980s, not really. Newsday focused on the popular, but utterly wrong, idea that Paramore were on their last legs, claiming “the closer Paramore gets to breaking up, the better it gets at finding reasons to stick together”. We know with the benefit of hindsight that the reforged trio of Hayley Williams, Taylor York and Zac Farro were going through a period of personal turmoil…

On stage at the Royal Albert Hall in London in June 2017, where fans lined up to see Paramore deliver the goods. A week later, the new single ‘Caught In The Middle’ was released, inspiring comparisons with No Doubt and 1990s ska-pop and also making it clear how far Paramore had now moved from the pop-punk and emo fringes. The new sound was pop, pure and simple, with expertly streamlined dimensions from the renowned producer Justin Meldal-Johnsen. Paramore faced their share of criticism for this smoothing-off of their music, of course, but Hayley was generally able to rationalise the group’s repositioning in the pop mainstream, pointing out accurately that the band members had been barely into their teens when they first started writing songs. What music were you writing at…

Taylor, Hayley and Zac pictured at National Concert Week at Live Nation in New York in April 2018. A powerful live band after so long in the game, Paramore were a solid choice to appear at this event, a celebration of live music. Praise for their live shows had always accompanied the group, with Alternative Press declaring that Hayley “has more charisma than singers twice her age, and her band aren’t far behind in their chops, either”, and the singer-songwriter John Mayer once non-ironically labelling her “the great orange hope”, referring to her famous hair colour. Occasionally Hayley is compared to pure pop singers such as Kelly Clarkson and pop‑punk artists like Avril Lavigne, and there’s an element of truth there, but to accept those references as the entire story…

Hayley and the band in a dramatic pose on the This Is Why tour at the Kia Forum in Inglewood, California, in July 2023. A remix album titled Re: This Is Why was teased shortly after this date, with details revealed gradually over time: the first of these came in the form of audio fragments at Paramore’s official Discord server in late September. The album itself came out on 6 October, and was described by the band themselves as “almost a remix album” – an accurate description, as its content included rewritten versions of songs from This Is Why and an unreleased demo, as well as the expected alternate mixes. While the remix record kept fans happy, the This Is Why album itself was nominated for Best Rock Album at…

Confetti rains on Joey Howard, Hayley Williams and Taylor York as they perform at the Boston Calling Music Festival at Harvard Athletic Complex in May 2023. A significant change in the band’s career was just around the corner, but there was no sign of this upheaval as the This Is Why dates continued to do great business through the year. Still, the band was coming up to the end of its second decade in business, an uninterrupted run – despite the changing line-ups – that few bands get to enjoy these days. Change is inevitable in the music business as in every other area of activity, particularly in the arts: the question is only how it is handled and whether it threatens anyone’s future plans. As we’ll see, the speedbump…