Album Review: Finally Having Her Cake: Hayley Williams and the Exploration of Grief. Hayley Releases Ego Death At A Bachelorette Party

While most discover the ego in an introductory psychology class, Hayley Williams has known hers needed to die since she was fifteen years old, signing a twenty-year contract with a record label that would keep her in close musical confinement until she was thirty-five years old. In her time as the lead singer of Paramore, she’s experienced an entire lifetime. Ego Death At a Bachelorette Party is her first EP following the conclusion of her contract with Atlantic Records, and with it comes an entire voyage of the soul exploring grief, curiosity, the unknown, the inevitable, and every experience she’s had in between. While not biographical in technicality, fans cannot help but trace the anecdotal lyricisms in Williams’s songwriting. Moving from her ego death triggered by individuality into soft but agonized reflections amidst grieving love’s absence, Ego Death At A Bachelorette Party is the giant, three tiered cake Hayley Williams wanted to have and eat at the same time. Hands full of crumbs, Hayley Williams’s album is an epic that journeys through her buried pain adjacent to her ever-fixed star of hope and optimism. It’s a mirror in which we find her asking herself who she is while still casting back a vision of what she could become. 

The album kicks off with “Ice in my OJ,” a brief, percussion-forward track leaning into her spinning state as she screams “I’m in a band, I’m in a band, I’m in a band, I’m in a band,” threatening to bring us back to Mississippi (which she later does). Moving into “Glum,” Williams begins to ask the questions that point to the ego death upon which her album’s title rests: “Do you ever feel so alone / That you could implode / and no one would know? And when you look around and nobody’s home / Don’t you wanna go back / to wherever we’re from?” The ego death in question aligns with her high, soft vocals, leading up to the existential vacancy of her professional shift and personal grief: “I do not know if I’ll ever know / What in the living fuck I’m doing here / Does anyone know if this is normal?”

“Kill Me” explores the concept of the fig tree of feminism, an ode to the irreconcilable differences between professional career-hood and the maternal weight of carrying forward the bloodline passed to her by her mother (“I think I’m where the bloodline ends / I’ll never do the right thing again”), further asking her listeners to consider whether or not the things that do not kill us actually do make us stronger. Followed by light, inquisitive “Whim,” we’re given the gift of safety and see the shift towards the more personal elements of romantic experience: “Listen how the heart beats / Lying next to him,” recognizing the ways in which our physical body recognizes the safe (“it always tells the truth”) if we are only brave enough to trust it without the doubt triggered by the weight of past experience (“Searching for a blood stain / Bandages are clean”). The song leaves us with an echo of want: ““I want to be in love / To believe in us / Sans sabotage,” 

“Mirtazapine” was an early release, and for good reason. An ode to a medication used to treat major depressive disorder, yes, (“For when you’re crying at the sky / And losing all your appetite”), but more relevantly, a signifier for the ways in which Hayley Williams is also, just like the rest of us, coping with the fractured reality left in the wake of life changes and a bandaid for the ways in which we grieve them (“For when you’re happy for a day / Then wake up to remembering / That things’ll never be the same / Feels like it’s your fault it turned out that way”). 

“Disappearing Man” is a pop acoustic interrogation in the face of abandonment: “Disappearing man / You could really have anyone / And you had me / Why’d you let me go?” A track that almost stares an older lyrical version of herself in the face, no longer holding her breath, no longer making room for an exception. Followed by “Love me Different,”, a bouncy track reflecting on a love lost that won’t come back again (“The pleasure and the agony’s all mine”), closing with a nod to self love in spite of all of it: “Endless hours of therapy / 2 prescriptions / No good routines / Guess I’m the one who’s gotta love me differently”).

“Brotherly Hate” drips with bloody angst, begging for a blood oath, a spit shake, and a genuine sense of loyalty, while “Negative Self Talk” is a twinkly, reflective grief for a collective sound encapsulated (“Home is where we were loud / Used to sing down the hall / To your signature sound / Now it’s just so quiet”), echoed back by her own sounds of negativity and silent aches (“Quiet mind’s a loaded canon / Who’s it aimed at now?”). Juxtaposed by “Ego Death At A Bachelorette Party” - a track that could be a caption turned song lyric - imagining Hayley Williams hearing her music at a country bar hosting a bachelorette party sums up ego death in a nutshell (“can only go up from here”), followed by “Hard,” a likely homage to the natural hardened shell that comes from guarding one’s heart following a vulnerable lapse (So hit me / I can’t get soft / ‘Cause I’m too hard / And my ribs are / Metal cages / To guard my heart”). 

“Discovery Channel,” a cover begging us to question the extent to which at our most base, we are simply mammals, lulls us into “True Believer,” her most active, perhaps thoughtful track she’s ever written. “Strange fruit, hard bargain,” a reference to Black protest, echoed by the looming reality of the South and the love Hayley Williams holds for her home, paints itself into a portrait of grief for a place rather than a person or persona. The juxtaposition of these two tracks begs for an understanding of humanity coupled with grief for its inevitable change.

“Dream Girl in Shibuya” narrates the complex of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, exploring a trope of a reality lost once the self is revealed (“Should’ve stayed a mystery / Sipping on Japanese Whisky in the lobby bar / I could say ‘I gotta leave but let’s not let that come between us’” / Would it make you want me more?” and “I wonder do you  miss me when having me / Felt brand new?”), exploring the worn novelty of knowing and intimacy. “Blood Bros” responds back to “Brotherly Hate,” a reminder: “By now you should know / I’ll love you the same,’” but questioning the one-sidedness of loyalty: “I will love you forever / If that won’t make it worse.” Echoed again in “I Won’t Quit On You,” we experience Williams’s sense of loyalty pledged against the clause of ‘no matter what’ - hung by a lonely, stellar rhythm and lyrical poetry (“Chaos ridden inner space / Turns out home is not a place / When I think home I see your face / Up there so long / Everything changed / Chaos reaches outer space / Turns out nowhere is a place”). 

Perhaps her most committed and most played track, “Parachute” is her self-righteous, possibly even indignant refusal to leap into the arms of love without a net for safety. She writes to a glimpse of a life she’s watching herself lose, shaky despair hovering over amped melodies and a nod to her biographical and relational history: “And you were at my wedding, / I was broken, you were drunk / You could’ve told me not to do it, I would’ve run, I would’ve run.” Screaming into her mic, Hayley Williams’s loyalty lands directly in the gut of anyone who’s ever lost anything despite every effort to hold it firmly in our hand.

“Good Ol’ Days” and “Show Biz,” late additions to the album that land in the weeks leading up to her first ever global solo tour, echo a discovered sense of self amidst her earlier proclamations of grief. “Good Ol’ Days,” an experimental but perfect R&B track, is romantic and yearning while remaining reflective and grateful: “‘Cause I miss you like I miss the rage / Like I miss real ink on a page / Who knew, who knew my baby? / who knew the hard times were the good ol’ days?” Followed by Showbiz, Williams tells us in the end, she wants to be on a stage, despite her grief and despite the death of all she thought she was boxed in to be. 

Hayley Williams announced her tour Monday, September 10th with presale information. Head to her website to register!