This Is Why by Paramore
This Is Why is the sixth studio album by American rock band Paramore, released on February 10, 2023, through Atlantic Records. It is the band's first album in nearly six years, following After Laughter (2017), as well as their first album to feature the same line-up as its predecessor. Three singles preceded the album: "This Is Why", "The News", and "C'est Comme Ça". This Is Why received universal acclaim from critics. Background and recording In May 2017, Paramore released their fifth studio album After Laughter to critical acclaim. The album saw the return of former drummer Zac Farro, who had left the band in 2010. The band toured in support of the album from June 2017 until September 2018. Following the conclusion of the After Laughter Tour, the members of Paramore took a break from writing and recording music for the band and worked on other endeavors. Hayley Williams featured on the American Football song "Uncomfortably Numb" in 2019 and released two solo albums, Petals for Armor (2020) and Flowers for Vases / Descansos (2021); the former produced by Paramore guitarist Taylor York. She also pivoted her attention more towards her hair dye company Good Dye Young and hosted the weekly BBC Sounds series Everything Is Emo. Farro continued his ongoing project HalfNoise, releasing an extended play – Flowerss (2018) – and two albums – Natural Disguise (2019) and Motif (2021). Farro also recorded drums for the songs "Watch Me While I Bloom" and "Crystal Clear" from Williams' Petals for Armor and released an EP under his own name titled Zafari (2020). Discussions about a sixth Paramore album began in 2020 while Williams was promoting Petals for Armor. Williams hinted that the band's next album would be more guitar-driven, stating, "We've found ourselves listening to a lot of older music that we grew up being inspired by." She further commented on the sound of the album in 2022, likening it to Bloc Party: “From day one, Bloc Party was the number one reference because there was such an urgency to their sound that was different to the fast punk or the pop-punk or the like, loud wall of sound emo bands that were happening in the early 2000s.” In January 2022, the band confirmed they had entered the studio to work on their sixth album. Composition Logan Gourlay of Rock Sound called it a "jittery post-punk record" and noted Foals, Bloc Party and Talking Heads influences. Meredith Jenks and Christine Werthman of Billboard have described the album as "a tight, post-punk juggernaut that zeroes in on pandemic-fueled anxieties". Similarly, Arielle Gordon from Pitchfork characterized the album as "jittery, crackling post-punk." Andrew Sacher at BrooklynVegan claimed the album has "twitchy" dance-punk "all over ." According to Alexis Petridis of The Guardian, " stirs 00s alt-rock into the mix: the band have mentioned Bloc Party and Foals as influences." Ims Taylor of Clash stated that "Paramore opt for simple, striking, and forceful on ‘This Is Why’, keeping in that New Wave tradition of punchy phrases iterated and reiterated, through vivid guitar countermelodies, offbeat punctuation and pointed lyrical looping of lyrics that go beyond verse chorus verse chorus, searing each song’s character into your mind indelibly." The Sydney Morning Herald noted that "the album’s last three tracks swirl around a dream-pop axis." According to Chris Thiessen of Under the Radar, "The back half of the album feels tonally different from the front, more personal and relational and coming closer to their pop-punk roots." Maximo David of Boolin Tunes states "any notion that This Is Why is Paramore 'returning to their roots,' or whatever a number of pundits may have purported over the years is almost unequivocally false."
Few rock bands this side of Y2K have committed themselves to forward motion quite like Paramore. But in order to summon the aggression of their sixth full-length, the Tennessee outfit needed to look back—to draw on some of the same urgency that defined them early on, when they were teenaged upstarts slinging pop punk on the Warped Tour. “I think that's why this was a hard record to make,” Hayley Williams tells Apple Music of <i>This Is Why</i>. “Because how do you do that without putting the car in reverse completely?” In the neon wake of 2017’s <i>After Laughter</i>—an unabashed pop record—guitarist Taylor York says he found himself “really craving rock”. Add to that a combination of global pandemic, social unrest, apocalyptic weather and war, and you have what feels like a suitable backdrop (if not cause) for music with edges. “I think figuring out a smarter way to make something aggressive isn't just turning up the distortion,” York says. “That’s where there was a lot of tension, us trying to collectively figure out what that looks like and can all three of us really get behind it and feel represented. It was really difficult sometimes, but when we listened back at the end, we were like, ‘Sick.’” What that looks like is a set of spiky but highly listenable (and often danceable) post-punk that draws influence from early-2000s revivalists like Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Bloc Party, The Rapture, Franz Ferdinand and Hot Hot Heat. Throughout, Williams offers relatable glimpses of what it’s been like to live through the last few years, whether it’s feelings of anxiety (the title cut), outrage (“The News”) or atrophy (“C’est Comme Ça”). “I got to yell a lot on this record, and I was afraid of that, because I’ve been treating my voice so kindly and now I’m fucking smashing it to bits,” she says. “We finished the first day in the studio and listened back to the music and we were like, ‘Who is this?’ It simultaneously sounds like everything we've ever loved and nothing that we've ever done before ourselves. To me, that's always a great sign, because there's not many posts along the way that tell you where to go. You're just raw-dogging it. Into the abyss.”
