{"id":1987934,"date":"2025-08-30T04:09:45","date_gmt":"2025-08-30T04:09:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/?p=1987934"},"modified":"2025-08-30T04:09:45","modified_gmt":"2025-08-30T04:09:45","slug":"hayley-williams-ego-death-at-a-bachelorette-party-album-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/hayley-williams-ego-death-at-a-bachelorette-party-album-review\/","title":{"rendered":"Hayley Williams, ‘Ego Death At a Bachelorette Party’ Album Review"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>\n

[Editor\u2019s 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\u2019s official release on August 28 and the new material present.]<\/em><\/p>\n

Hayley Williams made her official solo debut in 2020, releasing the Daniel James-produced Petals For Armor<\/em> while still locked into a predatory label deal with Atlantic that she and her band, Paramore, only recently escaped<\/a>. In the shadow of a decade-defining pop-rock album like After Laughter<\/em>\u2014and in the early months of COVID-19\u2014Petals For Armor<\/a><\/em> never got to stretch out properly. The songs, packed with voice memos, mood shifts, Williams\u2019 impossibly great tenor, and stories of recovery and relationships woven into sugary platitudes, were really good, don\u2019t get me wrong. But the timing was just off enough to stifle the effort.<\/p>\n

Then came a follow-up: Flowers For Vases \/ Descansos<\/em>, which would be overpowered by another Paramore album, This Is Why<\/a><\/em>, within two years\u2019 time\u2014and 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<\/em>, Williams has turned her focus back onto her solo material\u2014and, for the first time, nothing is in her way. Williams\u2019 third album isn\u2019t even an album, technically<\/em>. On Friday, she unveiled 17 singles in coordination with her Good Dye Young hair company. Flanked in hues of marigold crafted \u201cin the heat of the moment,\u201d a limited-edition dye was named Ego. At first, fans were calling the collection of songs Ego<\/em>. Now, Williams has compiled everything into an official full-length format.<\/p>\n

Tended to by a returning James, Ego Death At a Bachelorette Party<\/em> is undoubtedly Hayley Williams\u2019 best offering of solo music to-date, and there\u2019s an argument to be made that it\u2019s among her most impressive music period<\/em>. 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!<\/em> and After Laughter<\/em>. What she sings in \u201cNegative Self Talk\u201d is true: \u201cI write like a volcano.\u201d This is not the work of the woman who leads Paramore, but a reminder that Williams\u2019 talents are broader and far more contrasting than Paramore\u2019s safest conventions. Ego<\/em>, in all of its boundary-nudging, alt-pop glory, sounds like a reset for a musician who has long deserved it\u2014because let\u2019s 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 \u201cPost Atlantic.\u201d She even cuts right to the chase about the contract baggage on \u201cIce In My OJ,\u201d screaming \u201cI\u2019m in a band! I\u2019m in a band!\u201d until the blister erupts.<\/p>\n

\n

With no tracklist or sequence to adhere to, Ego Death At a Bachelorette Party<\/em>\u00a0is a grab-bag of enjoyment. But the miscellany is never reduced to randomness, only a curation of strengths. \u201cMirtazapine,\u201d a tribute to anti-depressents (\u201cyou make me eat, you make me sleep\u201d), uses lovey-dovey tropes to break containment. In a glaze of distorted guitars, Williams shouts to the heavens, \u201cWho am I without you now?\u201d Her voice strains the farther the instruments crawl. While \u201cZissou\u201d offers a tame yet sensual respite, \u201cEgo Death At a Bachelorette Party\u201d takes a clever swipe at, presumably, Morgan Wallen (\u201cI\u2019m the biggest star at this racist country singer\u2019s bar\u201d). And if you\u2019re looking for something that resembles Paramore\u2019s style, the self-love treasure \u201cLove Me Different\u201d will put you front row. There, the band\u2019s touring multi-instrumentalist Brian Robert Jones lends a lush montage of guitar and bass to Jones\u2019 gooey synth programming, until Williams\u2019 singing crests into a stirring repetition: \u201cI want, I want, I want, I want, I want, I want.\u201d<\/p>\n

The scuzzy \u201cDiscovery Channel\u201d not only features an interpolation of Bloodhound Gang\u2019s \u201cThe Bad Touch,\u201d but some of Williams\u2019 best passages (\u201cBarbaric bliss, teeth gnash when we kiss \/ No wound to lick, \u2018cause the hurt is hidden\u201d). Again, she points to her time with Atlantic (\u201cTwenty-something years ago, we started playing a little game\u201d) but transmutes it into a millennial yawp reckoning with multiple decades of hurt: \u201cI can\u2019t heal, you keep ripping me open.\u201d The poison-tongued blood oath of \u201cBrotherly Hate\u201d (\u201cnick your hand, spit into it, shake hands, that\u2019s how you do it\u201d) simmers into a lilt on the papercut-covered \u201cBlood Bros.\u201d The song\u2014a softer, matured, 15-years-later sequel to \u201cThe Only Exception\u201d\u2014is Williams at her best. Lines like \u201c\u2018till we\u2019re just two fishes flipping on dry land\u201d and \u201chook, line, and sinker, covered in sand\u201d are earned in the afterglow of a couplet like \u201cFilled to the brim, pour a little out each day \/ \u2018Till it\u2019s not quite empty, and we swim just above the drain.\u201d When surrounded by carefully executed disses towards her old label, Williams\u2019 beats of sincerity feel all the more celebratory.<\/p>\n