[Editor’s Note: The first version of this review was published on August 5, after Williams released 17 singles all at once. This version reflects the album’s official release on August 28 and the new material present.]
Hayley Williams made her official solo debut in 2020, releasing the Daniel James-produced Petals For Armor while still locked into a predatory label deal with Atlantic that she and her band, Paramore, only recently escaped. In the shadow of a decade-defining pop-rock album like After Laughter—and in the early months of COVID-19—Petals For Armor never got to stretch out properly. The songs, packed with voice memos, mood shifts, Williams’ impossibly great tenor, and stories of recovery and relationships woven into sugary platitudes, were really good, don’t get me wrong. But the timing was just off enough to stifle the effort.
Then came a follow-up: Flowers For Vases / Descansos, which would be overpowered by another Paramore album, This Is Why, within two years’ time—and Williams and her bandmates were rewarded with two Grammys, including Best Rock Album, in 2024. But now, while Paramore is off the road and celebrating the 20th anniversary of its debut album, All We Know Is Falling, Williams has turned her focus back onto her solo material—and, for the first time, nothing is in her way. Williams’ third album isn’t even an album, technically. On Friday, she unveiled 17 singles in coordination with her Good Dye Young hair company. Flanked in hues of marigold crafted “in the heat of the moment,” a limited-edition dye was named Ego. At first, fans were calling the collection of songs Ego. Now, Williams has compiled everything into an official full-length format.
Tended to by a returning James, Ego Death At a Bachelorette Party is undoubtedly Hayley Williams’ best offering of solo music to-date, and there’s an argument to be made that it’s among her most impressive music period. What the title suggests and what the music provides are dueling objectives: Williams is confident and unglued, producing songs that rival the marquee parts of Riot! and After Laughter. What she sings in “Negative Self Talk” is true: “I write like a volcano.” This is not the work of the woman who leads Paramore, but a reminder that Williams’ talents are broader and far more contrasting than Paramore’s safest conventions. Ego, in all of its boundary-nudging, alt-pop glory, sounds like a reset for a musician who has long deserved it—because let’s not forget that, in 2003, Williams signed to Atlantic Records as a solo artist at the age of 14. The label wanted to make her a pop singer, but she wanted to be in a band. 22 years later, Williams is free, naming her own label “Post Atlantic.” She even cuts right to the chase about the contract baggage on “Ice In My OJ,” screaming “I’m in a band! I’m in a band!” until the blister erupts.
With no tracklist or sequence to adhere to, Ego Death At a Bachelorette Party is a grab-bag of enjoyment. But the miscellany is never reduced to randomness, only a curation of strengths. “Mirtazapine,” a tribute to anti-depressents (“you make me eat, you make me sleep”), uses lovey-dovey tropes to break containment. In a glaze of distorted guitars, Williams shouts to the heavens, “Who am I without you now?” Her voice strains the farther the instruments crawl. While “Zissou” offers a tame yet sensual respite, “Ego Death At a Bachelorette Party” takes a clever swipe at, presumably, Morgan Wallen (“I’m the biggest star at this racist country singer’s bar”). And if you’re looking for something that resembles Paramore’s style, the self-love treasure “Love Me Different” will put you front row. There, the band’s touring multi-instrumentalist Brian Robert Jones lends a lush montage of guitar and bass to Jones’ gooey synth programming, until Williams’ singing crests into a stirring repetition: “I want, I want, I want, I want, I want, I want.”
The scuzzy “Discovery Channel” not only features an interpolation of Bloodhound Gang’s “The Bad Touch,” but some of Williams’ best passages (“Barbaric bliss, teeth gnash when we kiss / No wound to lick, ‘cause the hurt is hidden”). Again, she points to her time with Atlantic (“Twenty-something years ago, we started playing a little game”) but transmutes it into a millennial yawp reckoning with multiple decades of hurt: “I can’t heal, you keep ripping me open.” The poison-tongued blood oath of “Brotherly Hate” (“nick your hand, spit into it, shake hands, that’s how you do it”) simmers into a lilt on the papercut-covered “Blood Bros.” The song—a softer, matured, 15-years-later sequel to “The Only Exception”—is Williams at her best. Lines like “‘till we’re just two fishes flipping on dry land” and “hook, line, and sinker, covered in sand” are earned in the afterglow of a couplet like “Filled to the brim, pour a little out each day / ‘Till it’s not quite empty, and we swim just above the drain.” When surrounded by carefully executed disses towards her old label, Williams’ beats of sincerity feel all the more celebratory.
The lovesick cinema of “Dream Girl In Shibuya,” the guitar-driven, tough-as-nails vibrato in “Hard,” and the hazy experimentation of “Negative Self Talk” all bend to Williams’ color. Her ambitions are distinct and contradictive. No two singles sound alike, and her lyrics have never been so towardly (see: “True Believer” and “Ego Death At a Bachelorette Party”). But Ego Death At a Bachelorette Party is at its best during “Whim” and “Glum,” both of which have the potential to be pop classics. On the latter, a menagerie of pitch-shifted vocals, guitar frolicking, rock drumming, and an early-aughts melody swirl while Williams gets candid about the malaise of aging, singing about what purpose awaits her: “On my way to 37 years, I do not know if I’ll ever know what in the living fuck I’m doing here. Does anyone know if this is normal? I wonder.”
Across the aisle, the heady “Whim” is ecstatic and masterful, as James’ tinsel synths and Williams’ roomy falsetto potently blend. It’s not the most revelatory chorus on Ego, but “I want to be in love, to believe in us, sans sabotage” is intoxicating—as are the soul-inflected guitar rumbles swaggering through the stamina of “Kill Me,” or the brooding, atmospheric overlays on Ben Kaufman’s strings during the Jim-E Stack-assisted, faith-stricken reactions of “True Believer.” Previously unreleased song “Parachute,” which was absent from Williams’ file-dump earlier this month, is the album’s shiny, synth-pop conclusion—a prize, considering the previous 17 songs were already that good. The “I thought you were gonna catch me, I never stopped falling for you” chorus is not only total ear-candy, but a new contender for Williams’ coolest and most-captivating achievement yet.
One can only hope that this approach to sharing music becomes contagious. Bands selling handmade cassette tapes at DIY shows isn’t front-page material anymore—though you can argue it never was—but it’s still unorthodox by industry standards, like dropping an album on a Wednesday or forgoing fanfare and promotion. Hayley Williams’ process here, to share a double album’s worth of tracks all at once, without much notice (except for early access granted to Good Dye Young customers), is certainly taboo as well. While her choice is still beholden to digital accessibility, it feels like a grassroots decision nonetheless—the mark of an independent artist making her first independent release unique. And, at a time when artists are consistently getting fucked over by bad streaming royalties, merch cuts, and a shrinking critical ecosystem, the slightest detours from the beaten path (especially the really good ones, like Ego Death At a Bachelorette Party) feel like miracles worth talking about.
Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Los Angeles.
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