Hayley Williams, Without a Guidebook
The singer-songwriter talks about growing up in the South, trusting your teen-age self, getting divorced and getting exhausted, and the search for a home.
This month, Paramore—a buoyant and nimble pop-rock band fronted by the thirty-four-year-old singer and songwriter Hayley Williams—released “This Is Why,” its sixth album, and the first since 2017’s “After Laughter.” Though Paramore is still considered a pillar of the early-two-thousands pop-punk scene—a now mostly bygone era of neon-streaked hair, exuberant riffs, white belts, urgent and plaintive lyrics, and Vans in varying stages of purposeful disintegration—the band has spent much of the past decade making dynamic, tender rock music that’s rooted in rhythm and blues and feels at odds with the wounded grousing of its former colleagues.
