It’s hard to grasp the monumental business decision Hayley Williams faced before she’d even gotten her driver’s license. By the time she was 15, she had signed a 20-year contract with Atlantic Records—an agreement that would keep her tied up with the major label longer than she’d been alive. The “360 deal” made it so labels could profit from all parts of an artist’s work at a time when file sharing siphoned revenue from music sales. In exchange for developing Williams—conceptualized initially as a solo artist and eventually, at her insistence, as part of the pop-punk band Paramore—Atlantic would take a percentage from touring, merchandising, publishing, and more. On the opening track of her third solo album, Ego Death at a Bachelorette Party, Williams frostily scorns the arrangement: “A lot of dumb motherfuckers that I made rich.”
Ego Death is Williams’ first LP since fulfilling the terms she committed to practically a lifetime ago, and she easily could have chosen to make it a hard-earned celebration or a justified victory lap. Instead, she sits in the aftershocks of that original choice, tracing how the tremors rippled out beyond her professional world. Scaly synths on “Hard” mirror the tough exterior she’s developed to survive; her deeper feelings about that sacrifice erupt on the chorus, where her voice rises in forceful anguish. Retro pop-rock “Glum” presents a weightier self-realization: “I do not know if I’ll ever know/What in the living fuck I’m doing here,” Williams sings in the careful cadence of confession, her voice surreally modified to sound adolescent.
Those anxieties speak to the larger grief churning underneath Ego Death. It’s a theme Williams has explored explicitly in her previous solo work. But here, she takes a slanted approach, writing through adjacent emotions that are often safer to feel than the full cratering of loss. “The hurt is hidden,” she admits from an anesthetized distance on “Discovery Channel,” in which the chorus from Bloodhound Gang’s raunchy late-’90s single “The Bad Touch” punctuates revealing verses about a fraught and fraying romance.
Grief appears prismatically, manifesting in various shades and intensities. On “True Believer,” a brooding, cinematic elegy co-written with Jim-E Stack and others, it informs Williams’ longing for the Nashville of yore. On “Kill Me,” which details the hyper-independence that can come from reckoning with trauma, it provokes disassociation, numbing her delivery on each verse before her backing vocals turn goading. The emotion is most palpable, however, when she addresses romantic frustrations. Accompanied by acoustic guitar and tender synths on the restrained “Blood Bros,” she holds tight to a love she still feels—a pronounced ache threading her vocal sustain—even as she’s asked to relinquish the relationship that once contained it. Grief further shapeshifts on the explosive closer “Parachute,” flaring into charged anger, as Williams belts about being abandoned by a once-unshakeable partner, the song’s grizzled bridge intensifying the height of her hurt.
On Williams’ first two solo albums, she deliberately carved a path outside Paramore’s sound, leaning into art pop on 2020’s Petals for Armor and spare intimacy on 2021’s FLOWERS for VASES / descansos. Here, she doesn’t limit herself to one cohesive palette. Instead, she and producer Daniel James frame Williams’ multi-octave range in a variety of pop subgenres—indie pop, pop rock, dream pop—giving it ample space to roam and ramble. That assortment of styles edges Ego Death closer to a playlist than a traditional album, which makes sense: Before releasing a formal tracklist, Williams made the songs available to download independently, asking fans to assemble their own order. Closure may be a modern-day myth, but Ego Death seems to constitute a powerful coda to this protracted chapter of Williams’ career. It’s a crucial pause, an acknowledgement of all she’s endured. As Williams tells herself on the bright electro-pop “Whim”: “Something in the stillness/Gets you to the truth.”
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