Hayley Williams Says Everything At Once on "Petals for Armor"
Hayley Williams, by Lindsey Byrnes
On her debut solo album, Hayley Williams covers a lot of emotional and musical ground.
Petals for Armor, Hayley Williams’ debut solo project, is an expansive and winding admission of frustration and forgiveness. The album begins on “Simmer” with the lines, “Rage is a quiet thing / Ooh, you think that you’ve tamed it / But it’s just lying in wait.” The chorus then asks the question, “Oh, how to draw the line between wrath and mercy?” The rest of the album wobbles between these two states in an attempt to answer that question.
The 15-song album was released in three parts, an atypical method, but one Williams discussed openly in a press release. She said she “thought it best to separate some of these themes so that there can be time for everyone to digest some of the songs before we move along to others.” After hearing the album in entirety, this decision makes a lot of sense.
The first leg of the album was released as an EP, Petals for Armor I. These songs made it clear that this album would be covering a lot of ground both thematically and sonically, with each song feeling like it was cut from slightly different cloth. “Sudden Desire” ends the EP, and during its initial release, I found this end point fascinating. The song feels very early Paramore, filled with the rage of an earlier Hayley Williams. It’s more guitar-led than some of the more pop-leaning songs on the album, but the song in no way feels like an ending. It builds, and then stays there. It feels very much like the beginning of a new chapter.
The next leg that was released was a series of singles over the course of many weeks, one of which featured all the members of supergroup boygenius. “Dead Horse” begins this leg, and it starts with a voicemail recording of Williams saying, “Alright, it took me three days to send you this, but, uh, sorry I was in a depression. But I’m trying to come out of it now.” On this song, Williams also talks about being the other woman, and the weight of that secrecy, singing, “Held my breath for a decade / Dyed my hair blue to match my lips / Cool of me to try / Pretty cool I’m still alive.” This is a topic Fiona Apple’s new album also discusses, and both examples finding forgiveness and humility rather than the anger we’d normally expect.
The last leg was finally released as part of the full album. But even now, having months to process its individual pieces, it’s difficult to see Petals for Armor in its entire breadth.
The songs cover so much ground that it's hard to see from one end of the album to the other. At the start, I have no idea how far I’m expected to run, and by the end I don’t remember where I started. The album has its more haunting moments, like on “Roses/Lotus/Violet/Iris” and its more danceable moments like on “Sugar On The Rim.” There are songs that feel St. Vincent-adjacent and Radiohead-adjacent, and there are songs also rooted in different eras of Paramore albums. There’s romantic pain, familial pain, and the pain of simply being alive. Some songs center guitar, some songs center synths, some songs are for jumping around in anger and some are for dancing in a club. The scope is vast and changes quickly. It’s an exhausting listen, but also a fulfilling one.
The album’s breadth mirrors Williams’ own growth since starting Paramore and being shaped by Paramore. Hayley Williams never wanted to be a solo artist, and she still doesn’t. When she was a teenager she was signed to Atlantic Records with the intention of making her a pop star. But she was insistent that she wanted to make rock music, and she wanted to make it with her friends. In a recent interview with Vulture, Williams opened up about these early days with Paramore and the sexism she faced in the Warped Tour scene and also from within her own band. The pop-punk, Warped Tour scene that Williams came up in was one that she described as “brutally misogynistic.” With Williams being the only person actually signed to Atlantic Records, there was tension between members, despite her repeated insistence that they were a collective unit, and that she was not the star.
Williams also went through a divorce in 2018 during Paramore’s “After Laughter” Tour, and has been very open about her mental health struggles in the wake of it. This is also around the same time that she announced Paramore would no longer be performing their song “Misery Business,” one of their biggest hits, because Williams believed the lyrics she wrote when she was 17 were too slut-shamey to continue performing as she’s grown into her feminism.
Petals for Armor is a culmination of all of these things. It’s an album clearly born out of sudden clarity, of therapy, one where truths about ourselves come pouring quickly and in every direction. She’s processing all of these moments at once in front of us. In her Vulture interview, Williams talked about how part of her feels ridiculous putting out music with everything else going on, but a bigger part of her needs to get it out. “Lately, I need to feel like this is coming out of me. I’ve been pregnant with it for so long.”
Petals for Armor is full to the brim, as though she’s trying to say everything she needs to say at once. She’s processing herself, her band, her marriage, and more, all in 15 tracks. At times that makes it difficult to fully process everything she’s given us. By the time I reach the last leg of the album, I’m tired. I appreciate each song in its own right, but all together, I’m not able to see any one thing quite clearly.
Williams is already talking about Paramore’s next album and insists that her band will remain her priority despite her making this solo album. In her posts about this album, she’s self-conscious about the amount of attention that’s on her, on how much she’s sharing her own face. From the start, she’s always wanted to be in a band, and still does. But not everything can be said with shared voices. Petals for Armor is an expulsion of everything that belongs to only Hayley Williams.
