Paramore announce new album ‘This Is Why’ and share title track
New single 'summarises the plethora of ridiculous emotions, the rollercoaster of being alive in 2022, having survived even just the last 3 or 4 years,' says Hayley Williams
By Tomás Mier
It’s official: Paramore is dropping a new album. On Wednesday, the group fronted by Hayley Williams announced that it will be releasing its first album since 2017, This Is Why, on Feb. 10. The band also released the LP’s first single, aptly titled, ‘This Is Why.’
“This is why I don’t leave the house/You say the coast is clear/But you won’t catch me out,” the band sings in the chorus of their new song. “Oh, why?/This is why.”
The track is the first taste of the band — comprising Williams, Taylor York, and Zac Farr — and their new, 10-song LP, which they recorded in Los Angeles with collaborator Carlos de la Garza.
About the new single, Williams said ‘This Is Why’ was the last song the group wrote from the record.
“To be honest, I was so tired of writing lyrics, but Taylor convinced Zac and I both that we should work on this last idea. What came out of it was the title track for the whole album,” Williams said in a statement. “It summarizes the plethora of ridiculous emotions, the rollercoaster of being alive in 2022, having survived even just the last 3 or 4 years.”
She added, “You’d think after a global pandemic of fucking biblical proportions and the impending doom of a dying planet, that humans would have found it deep within themselves to be kinder or more empathetic or something.”
The visual, which laces close-up clips of the band performing with nostalgic visuals of Hayley Williams applying lipstick all over her face inside a trailer home, was directed by Turnstile’s Brendan Yates.
Regarding the new album, Williams spoke to Zane Lowe on Apple Music 1 about experimenting with new sounds.
“We were able to really lean into some of those earliest influences where a lot of electro clash and stuff that had a lot of groove, but it was really aggressive. I don’t know, I love Dev Hynes’ journey because he was in Test Icicles, and then you listen to what he’s doing now and all the artists that he’s worked with,” she said. “And that’s the kind of artist that we want to be considered as. Zac plays some of his most aggressive stuff on this record and it was so… I was freaking out to be watching it in the studio because we hadn’t seen it in a minute.”
She added, “And yet, like you said, there’s some beautiful restraint that I think shows up in all of us in different parts that really allows other things to speak. This was such a cool experiment, really.”
The album announcement comes about nine months after Williams told Rolling Stone that the group was back in the studio together.
“We wrote and tracked something we loved and it actually surprised us,” Williams said in an email at the time. “We kept joking it was all downhill from that point, but thank God we’ve been surprised a lot throughout this whole thing. I’m always waiting for the moment for us to know we’re onto something new and we’re not just rehashing the same shit.”