album review: 'this is why' by paramore

I think it’s well known by now that Paramore has never really clicked for me.

And this is where I would normally dump all of my disclaimers just like I did in my last few Paramore reviews, especially as the band has cemented their place coming out of the 2000s pop rock canon, but I don’t really want to do that anymore. Hayley Williams is an expressive frontwoman and the band can string together some catchy, emotionally evocative tunes, but I’ve always found them a bit underwhelming in the compositions and production, and a little underwritten with as many awkward missteps as slam dunks, of which I’d also apply to Hayley Williams’ solo output. That doesn’t make for a bad band - painting in strokes that are specific emotionally but broad in their poetry with a lot of presence will give you popular staying power - but they’ve never gripped me as much as I’d like outside of isolated moments.

Which is why I had a lot of skepticism about This Is Why, where the marketing has been ‘Paramore goes post-punk’, specifically referencing the 2000s-era revival of which Paramore were contemporaneous, On the surface, this seems like a natural progression - growing up, getting more thoughtful and mature and complex, and Paramore have the major advantage of having really good pop compositional instincts - but it felt like it could become high risk, high reward, leaning into a subgenre that prides itself on thorny complexity and wry disaffection on one hand or a much heavier, noisier sound on the other. The pop pivot of After Laughter seemed to fit closer to Paramore’s wheelhouse, even if I didn’t really care for it, and bringing back producer Carlos de la Garza who worked on that album and Williams’ solo projects felt a bit questionable, especially as he works way more in “indie” pop rock than post-punk judging by his credits. Thus far we’ve seen a polarized response and I wanted to give this some time to sink in. So, how is This Is Why?

So here’s the utterly exasperating thing with this album: as much as I was skeptical about the post-punk swerve that borrows liberally from The Talking Heads, Gang of Four, Bloc Party, Interpol, and probably about a dozen other indie post-punk acts the past decade out of the UK, I can see a world in which this works. As I said, this band has solid pop instincts and a lot of presence, a shot of energy could be welcome to a genre that has a reputation for going up its own ass. And some of that is there… but this is a lateral move and one that’s absolutely pushing against Paramore’s strengths - yes, it’s a new frontier for them, it’s probably the most openly ambitious project they’ve ever attempted, and if it’s your intro to a cool new sound, I can respect that. But I’ve been covering post-punk for around a decade and it’s not just that I find this middle-of-the-road at best within the genre and where the influences are blatantly obvious, it’s also not hard to spot where This Is Why comes up short.

And it’s worth starting with my thinking that this is not all Paramore’s fault, because compositionally, this album seems to be hitting the mark of Paramore-making-post-punk - the guitar lines are more jagged, the bass grooves have more nervy energy and presence than ever before even if you can tell the session work is more for utility than flair, and the compositions swerve into wonkier chord progressions. I’m iffier on the drumwork - sometimes there’s some sharper precision and more complex progressions to match the more developed grooves, but Zac Farro’s playing often feels weirdly muffled across a lot of this album, especially with the snare. But that’s likely due to the factor I expected would be a big issue right from the start: Carlos de la Garza’s production just feels off for post-punk. There’s no crackle or dryness to the mix, the guitars spark but never seethe or explode, Williams’ vocals be they messier shouts or a disaffected sneer are never positioned well in the mix to command anything, and the dynamics just feel weirdly flat, not helped by the gauzy synths that slip in every so often and add nothing. It’s desaturated, sure, but it doesn’t really accentuate any tightness or firepower…

Or if it does, it becomes very obvious where Paramore was cribbing notes. Bloc Party is the very obvious one, but this is no Silent Alarm or even Intimacy or Four, the explosive tension never manifests, and when you remember that Paramore’s greatest strength comes in their emotionally charged hooks, it’s no surprise that fans are gravitating to the more mid-tempo cuts and familiar-feeling ballads to find that resonance. Speaking of which, despite running just over thirty minutes, this is an album that flags in momentum fast… and while After Laughter had similar moments, that album was surrounded by flash and considerably better hooks to accentuate Hayley Williams’ depression, whereas this doesn’t have that gloss or artifice, especially by the end where the cuts are more reminiscent of sleepy Williams solo material, which I didn’t find that interesting. Now that’s not saying there aren’t moments I like - the title track kind of gets to old-school, nervy paranoia that Williams can share, ‘The News’ has the sandy frustration that infuses some midperiod Parquet Courts, and while ‘C’est Comme Ca’ is the most flagrant pull to make a new ‘Psycho Killer’ I’ve heard in a long-ass time, it is pulling from tones I’m inclined to like and the juxtaposition between flat disaffection and a snide kissoff leads to one of the more annoyingly effective hooks here. But that’s at the roots of the weird hollowness I feel: when it’s being framed as a big bold innovation and the best moments feel so obvious in their inspiration, it doesn’t feel remotely fresh and the missteps are all the more glaring - the honking guitar tone and offkey synths on ‘You First’ are an attempt at dance-punk that felt really sour and underpowered, and the fluttery elegance of ‘Big Man, Little Dignity’ and ‘Figure 8’ remind me way more of the Arctic Monkeys than they should. And I’ll admit it: I don’t think Hayley Williams is a great fit for this sound. She can get some notes of emotional complexity when she’s anchored in earnest love or rage or sadness, but self-effacing snark when the stakes don’t feel emotionally grounded, or flattened irony that deflects from rage, those require a different energy and poise than she has - and this has been an issue with Paramore since at least the self-titled album and ‘Ain’t It Fun’, a song a decade later that I still don’t think works that well.

But that might as well take us to the writing, and where I think this album stumbles the hardest - because you can tell the band is trying to do what they think they’re supposed to do. Like it or not, post-punk is often thorny and wordy and wildly overeducated - not smarter, I want to make that abundantly clear, but they’re at least trying to present like they want to be. And that’s where the very obvious influences really hurt Paramore again because, to be blunt, that’s not a style of writing they do well. Take ‘The News’, which is full of oversaturated fear and helplessness at the state of the modern world… but it stops there, there’s no deeper examination of those factors beyond how it impacts Hayley Williams, more thin rhetoric and buzzwords than actual substance. ‘C’est Comme Ca’ could have been a sharp example of the knife’s edge we walk between boring but healing self-care and a self-destructive chaos that’s too expensive to live well, but that next step outside of Williams’ personal sphere doesn’t materialize. And that could work - personal, relatable experiences as a critique of systems - but I never feel like we get that added step. Hell, ‘This is Why’ gets into polarization and paranoia at a world set to pick her apart, something I’d normally relate to given my platform, but it feels like the defensive first draft of something that doesn’t go deeper, beyond herself - and these are the songs I like! ‘Big Man, Little Dignity’ would be good as your stock critique of male privilege without that weird defeatist streak on the bridge, and it’s not the first that wants to give into darker impulses like ‘You First’, which has the feel of avoiding evil a lot more than choosing good, with the hope that karma does the dirty work, or how ‘Running Out Of Time’ has that same ‘guess I’m a fuckup’ mentality that persists into the go-nowhere bad relationship cycle of ‘Figure 8’. And yes, she tries to own it on songs like ‘Liar’ in admitting her love for bandmate Taylor York after lying to herself for so long, or how ‘Thick Skull’ tries to own all the toxic narratives that have been spread about Paramore for years and kind of misses that next step of actually moving on… but I dunno, when Taylor Swift was able to own her messy complexity it amplified her power, whereas Hayley Williams seems to shrink, with the moral framing never quite getting out of her own head, allowing for more complexity. I had this issue with her solo material as well the past few years - I’m not going to be wowed by style alone especially when I’ve heard so much of it.

And maybe that’s an unfair expectation - that sort of complex moral ambiguity can shade some emotions in performance but doesn’t often show up in Paramore’s writing, why would I expect it here beyond the conventions of genre? Well, that gets to the question of what anyone still wants from Paramore - as not much of a fan, I’m not the person to answer that question, but I do think they tried to ‘grow up’ with this album, do what they think they’re supposed to do, and it doesn’t fit them well. And I get not wanting to be a nostalgia band, but their artistic descendants are expanding the sounds of pop punk and emo that Paramore helped lay down in the mid-2000s, and even After Laughter worked better than this. I dunno, I think it’s very telling that the most Paramore-esque song on this album is ‘Crave’, which is all about loving or at least accepting nostalgia, in my opinion it would have been a stronger closer. And you know, it really bothered me when Williams distanced herself from ‘Misery Business’ a few years ago, even if as an artist I get why you might want to walk away from your art when it ages problematically - not only is it one of their best songs, I think there’s an ugly emotional truth to its melodrama that would be made more interesting by examining it, especially with the feminist critique. This Is Why still has that tentative feel, where it doesn’t have the teeth to wade into more potent and complex territory, even if stylistically it implies it will. And I know I’m coming off really harsh in this review - on stylism and composition alone I don’t think this is bad, Paramore don’t have a bad album in their catalog, and maybe it works as a gateway album, even if the reality is that very few are going to check out Silverbacks or Fontaines DC or Television or Parquet Courts or even the Talking Heads based off this - but I think Paramore are getting a big pass based on the post-punk pivot by some critics, and if you dig deeper, you won’t find much. Call it hit or miss, and if you want to know why this review is as late as it is… this is why.