Paramore's Hayley Williams just dropped 17 new songs — including the anthem track 'True Believer' — but don't call it an album
Paramore's frontwoman Hayley Williams dropped 17 new singles to streaming platforms on Friday, after a week of teasing fans with chaotic and cryptic marketing.
At the Newport Folk Festival on July 26, Williams gave a surprise performance of one of the new tracks, 'Mirtazapine,' and then debuted the song exclusively on Nashville Public Radio. Then, on Monday, July 28, Williams quietly uploaded all 17 of the songs to a password-protected website, which fans could access using a code included with a recently released hair dye from her brand, Good Dye Young. Roughly 24 hours later, the tracks were taken down without explanation, replaced with a simple message: 'Thank you for listening.'
The untitled project, which Williams released under her new label 'Post Atlantic' — a possible nod to Paramore ending its run with Atlantic Records — was released as individual singles on major streaming platforms without an official announcement, cover art or tracklist. Williams's Instagram feed reveals the individual credits for each of the songs. Collaborators on the project include producer Daniel James and Jim-E Stack, musicians Brian Robert Jones and Joey Howard.
The relative lack of promotion around the new tracks hasn't stopped fans from celebrating them online. One in particular, 'True Believer' — which functions as a scathing takedown of both Southern Christian hypocrisy and the gentrification of Nashville, Williams's hometown — made the rounds on TikTok before the project's official drop. Many applauded the bold, provocative lyrics that reference Billie Holiday's 'Strange Fruit,' a song about lynchings in the South.
Other notable tracks include 'Discovery Channel,' which samples the Bloodhound Gang's innuendo-filled 'The Bad Touch,' from 1999, and 'Glum,' that features lyrics like 'Do you ever feel so alone/That you could implode and no one would know?'
Some of the new songs have raised questions about whether Williams has split from her boyfriend, Paramore guitarist Taylor York, who she began dating in 2022. Some fans are pointing to songs like 'Disappearing Man' — which includes the lines 'Now, love, you're not the only one who's lonely/My final act of love was surrender' — as confirmation of the breakup.
The big question looming in the background of this new project is whether Paramore itself might be splitting up. The band opened for Taylor Swift in 2023 and 2024, during which time its website was wiped, leaving some fans concerned. However, the reason for shedding its online presence had to do with the end of their contract with Atlantic Records, not the end of the band itself. Though Williams may be working on solo stuff at the moment, there's no reason to suspect that it means the end of the band, which celebrated the 20th anniversary of its first album, All We Know Is Falling, on July 26. Williams has previously released two solo projects: Petals for Armor in 2020 and Flowers for Vases in 2021.
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