Staring at a printout of the day’s schedule, Paramore vocalist Hayley Williams lets out a scream that’s equal parts excitement and terror. Warped Tour, the travelling US summer festival where set times are revealed the morning of the show, has pulled into the band’s hometown of Nashville and in a few hours, Paramore will be playing a primetime slot on the main stage. It’s been less than a year since the band put out their 2005 debut album, All We Know Is Falling.
“I’m pretty nervous now. I’m scared the stage will be this big and the crowd will be this big,” Williams says, while motioning wildly with her arms. “How did we do this? How did we get this?!”
So fearful that no-one would come to watch them play, she and her bandmates chalked up pavements around the Starwood Amphitheatre, advertising their band name and set time in huge font. They needn’t have worried – Paramore pulled one of the largest crowds of the day. Williams, dressed in a purple dress, her orange hair a halo of flame, thrashed her way through the set of exuberant pop punk, while a sea of people bellowed back every word.
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The noughties emo explosion was already in full swing by the time Paramore joined the party. They released All We Know Is Falling in a vintage year for the scene – alongside Fall Out Boy’s From Under The Cork Tree, Commit This To Memory by Motion City Soundtrack, Almost Here by The Academy Is…, and Panic! At The Disco’s debut, A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out – putting them firmly in the ‘one to watch’ bracket.
The band had formed when a 15-year old Williams moved home and subsequently met guitarist Josh Farro and his brother, drummer Zac Farro, at school in Franklin, Tennessee. Joined by bassist Jeremy Davis, together the group created jubilant pop punk that was fizzy as sherbet and had Christian undertones, set apart by Williams’ powerful vocal and her magnetic stage presence.
From the very beginning, they had shown a precociousness and confidence well beyond their years. One of their earliest on-camera interviews took place during Warped Tour 2005 where, sprawled on the grass at Orlando’s Tinker Field, a 16-year-old Hayley and 15-year old then-guitarist Jason Bynum, were asked if it was intimidating being on a lineup, which included established bands, Fall Out Boy and My Chemical Romance.
“No it’s not,” shrugged a remarkably calm Williams. “We’re having fun and all the bands have been super nice to us.”
![Paramore: Pressure [OFFICIAL VIDEO] - YouTube](https://img.youtube.com/vi/y-MaaxgdUT4/maxresdefault.jpg)
It was Paramore’s second album, 2007’s Riot!, that turned them into superstars. As they headed into the studio to begin recording, the band were unaware of the steep upward trajectory their lives were about to take. “We were just kids before Riot! came out,” Williams recalled to Track Seven in 2017. “In fact, we were kids for a long time after that! I have a distinct memory – in fact, somewhere there’s a video – of all of us… hanging out at the park. It was springtime, 2007, and we were literally playing in a field together. How much more innocent can you get? In many ways, it was the last uncomplicated season for us as friends.”
A few months later, the impact of the record became clear. “We were headed to a play a show at The Underworld in Camden and we were all looking out the window of the car we were in, and I saw the word “RIOT!” spray painted on the side of one of buildings, ways away from the venue,” Williams continued. She called Riot! “a lightning in a bottle sort of moment in time.”
“I knew it was for us because it was done in the same sort of scribble, almost exactly like what was on the album cover. That moment, I said out loud, ‘People get it! This is the best sign we could ever have… that other people are making it their own.’”
An electric shock of towering guitars and sugar rush payoffs, Riot! still stands up today as one of the era’s best records.
“They were underdogs because she was a girl, and at the time it was Fall Out Boy and Panic! At the Disco and all these boybands that were rock,” David Bendeth, who produced Riot! as well as co-writing some of the tracks, told Billboard. “She was like, ‘I hope we cut through with this record,’ and I said, ‘Don’t worry. We’re going to beef it up. We’re going to put bigger guitars on here.’ And she said, ‘I like it. I want it to rock.’ I felt like when I finishes the record and we listened back, that we had created this monster that was built like a British tank. It was solid. You could listen to it all the way through.”
The album’s lead track, Misery Business,a huge, elastic sing-along about a romantic rival, allegedly about Hayley’s real-life relationship at the time with guitarist Josh Farro, gave the band their first bona fide anthem. The song has since been reappraised by both fans and the band themselves due to lyrics they now consider to be misogynistic: ‘Once a whore, you’re nothing more… There’s a million other girls who do it just like you / Looking as innocent as possible to get to who / They want and what they want, it’s easy if you do it right / But I refuse, I refuse I refuse.’
![Paramore: Misery Business [OFFICIAL VIDEO] - YouTube](https://img.youtube.com/vi/aCyGvGEtOwc/maxresdefault.jpg)
In 2018, Hayley made a statement, putting her own unconscious bias under the microscope: “I’ll say this: Misery Business is not a set of lyrics that I relate to as a 26-year old woman. I haven’t related to it in a very long time. Those words were written when I was 17 … admittedly from a very narrow-minded perspective.”
Until recently, the band removed the song from their live sets. It is worth noting that Panic! At The Disco’s breakthrough track, I Write Sins Not Tragedies, which includes the line: ‘What a shame, the poor groom’s bride is a whore’ has never suffered the same level of scrutiny as that Misery Business has.
The album sold 42,000 copies in the US in its first week. By a year later, it had sold 700,000 copies and earned the band their first Grammy nomination, for Best New Artist (they lost out to Amy Winehouse). That year, the band made their first UK live appearance at the Give It A Name festival.
“There were so many firsts for us with Riot,” Hayley recalled to Time. “It was stressful and hectic and exciting all at once.”
The album’s success introduced Paramore to an audience of millions, and cemented Hayley as a trailblazer in a scene that was inherently misogynistic by design.
“I hope no young female experiences the shit that I experienced,” Hayley told the NME in 2023. “When we were teenagers, the way forward was to be tough all the time. Our entire scene was contributing to shitty treatment of women and anything that wasn’t masculine. We were out on Warped Tour, this little Fueled by Ramen band acting like a hardcore band on stage. It was like if I didn’t spit further, I felt like someone was going to throw me out.”
Many of emo’s most soaring anthems touched on broken hearts, bitter breakups and unrequited romance. As a result, the scene’s sizeable female fandom found themselves screaming along to lyrics by male bands, from Fall Out Boy, to The Used and Taking Back Sunday, that painted women as the villain. The press too, gave Hayley a rough ride. In 2005, Kerrang! came under fire from the band for publishing an interview with the band that marked Hayley out as dictatorial and shallow. In a scathing LiveJournal entry, the band clapped back. “Sorry if it offends anyone at Kerrang!, but I don’t think there was one bit of truth in that article.”
In stark contrast, the buoyant second track of Riot!, That’s What You Get, opens with the lyric: ‘No sir / Well I don’t wanna be the blame, not anymore / It’s your turn / So take a seat, we’re settling the final score.’ Suddenly female emo fans had a figurehead, their own age, one who could hold herself amid a sea of men, who they could relate to. As Refinery29 writer, Alexandra Koster, wrote in her 2023 essay, Why Paramore Is More Relevant Than Ever, “As girls, we finally started feeling seen. We finally felt like we belonged in the moshpit. We felt like we were listening to music that was made for us.”
Following the release of their third album, 2009’s Brand New Eyes, Paramore had taken emo’s relationship with the mainstream to new heights – their single Decode appeared on the Twilight soundtrack, while the track The Only Exception had featured in Glee. Yet, relationships had started to fracture within the band. Williams had been signed to Atlantic Records aged 14, but never had much interest in being a solo artist. Instead, after forming Paramore, she had fought the label to sign them as a band.
“There was a heated conversation with a team of people [at Atlantic] in which I said I would be just as happy to play these songs in Taylor’s basement for the rest of my life,” she recalled to Vulture in 2020. “It was a very empowered moment. My voice was shaking. I was crying.”
The band were eventually signed by Fall Out Boy’s label, Fueled By Ramen. Yet, despite efforts from Hayley to share the spotlight with her bandmates in interviews, even wearing a T-shirt onstage with the slogan ‘PARAMORE IS A BAND’, the inference that Paramore was merely a Hayley solo project was something they struggled to shake off, and came to a head in the years to follow.
In 2010, to the shock of their remaining bandmates, the Farro brothers quit the band, claiming to be “hired guns” and calling Paramore a “manufactured product of a major label, riding on the coattails of ‘Hayley’s dream.’” Since then, Paramore has been a messy revolving door of members – each of their first three albums was created by a different lineup, a trend that would continue until 2017’s After Laughter.
Much like their peers, by the late noughties, Paramore had started shifting away from emo. Their 2013 eponymous album replaced fiery pop for slick pop rock, taking their career to new heights. But they remain one of the most important bands of the noughties emo boom, offering fans a uniquely different perspective on feminine angst at a time when being a woman in alternative scenes was both difficult and complex. Today, they’re more relevant than ever.
“To grow up in this scene was not a simple thing,” Williams wrote in an open letter, published in 2022 ahead of Paramore’s headline performance at to emo revival festival When We Were Young. “To be celebrating it (and to be celebrated by it) is not a simple thing. Nothing about this life – for you, me, or anyone – is simple… What I did know was that for every ‘Take off your top!’ or snarky punkzine review… For every dramatic headline pinned on my name, or any season of self-doubt… No one was going to define Paramore but Paramore”.
Originally published in The Story Of Emo