Hayley Williams has never been one to cower in the face of the music industry, not one to back down or be quiet about her contempt. The singer, most known for being the lead of Paramore, has quite literally revolutionised the music industry. After being scouted by Atlantic Records and signed onto a 360 deal at only 14 years old, Williams has released six studio albums with Paramore, who, last year, became the first female-fronted band to win Best Rock Album. She has now also released three solo albums and collaborated with a multitude of artists, including B.o.B., Turnstile and Taylor Swift.
Now, after over 20 years in the music industry, her newest project, Ego Death at a Bachelorette Party, is her first release as an independent artist under the imprint Post Atlantic, a not-so-subtle dig at Atlantic, which had previously controlled her career and artistic output. From the get-go, Williams’ rollout has been unconventional to say the least. The initial announcement of new music didn’t come from the singer herself but from WNXP, Nashville’s public radio station, when Williams gave the staff a CD with two tracks – ‘Mirtazapine’ and ‘Glum’ – letting them choose which one would be the first single.
On 28 July, Williams made 17 new songs available for download on a restricted-access website, requiring a password distributed by her hair dye company Good Dye Young, a uniquely synergetic approach. These tracks were not released with a predetermined order, no album title, and were initially unavailable on streaming services. This itself subverts most aspects of a label release schedule; not having a countdown with the option to pre-save and making no use of algorithms on social media to promote the release, both of which labels normally use to generate excitement for a new project, and ultimately higher profits from initial streaming numbers.
Between the initial 17-song release on her website and eventually releasing EDAABP on 28 August, Williams encouraged fans to create their own track lists, re-sharing them on Instagram and seemingly taking inspiration and insight from fans’ responses to the tracks she shared. This casually interactive relationship Williams has cultivated with fans is a longstanding tradition, dating back to the days of Myspace and Tumblr. Centring fan experience and, most importantly, prioritising this over the rigidity of conventional label schedules evidently created huge amounts of grassroots anticipation for the album, with each track garnering over 1 million streams on Spotify before the project was even named.
Beyond the album release, Williams continues to disregard industry expectations. She released the album on her online shop alongside merch, specifying that artists will be paid a flat fee alongside royalties from each sale of the merch they designed. The lyrics of the opening track, “Ice In My OJ”, blatantly express the singer’s disdain for the music industry and its treatment of her. Williams accentuates the longevity of her music career by sampling the first track she ever recorded vocals for, “Jumping Inside” by Mammoth City Messengers, before referencing “lotta dumb motherf*ckers that I made rich”, referring to the financial exploitation that occurs in most record deals, especially with younger, more susceptible people.
The track also features her shouting “I’m in a band” repeatedly, an explicit reference to difficulties she has faced being the only member of Paramore to be individually signed to a record label, the media’s historical dismissal of other band members and the misogyny she has had to deal with her entire career in a male-dominated genre. She also playfully references this with merch that says, “Hayley Williams is my favourite band”. In a recent interview with The Face, Williams shares that writing EDAABP felt like a long-overdue expression of the frustrations she felt after signing her 360 deal and that “it freed her” from “that stage of development”.
It’s clear that this new project and her recent emancipation from Atlantic mark the start of a new era of artistic freedom for Hayley Williams.
“Hayley Williams – concierto de Paramore en Bogotá, Colombia (2011) – 5569060233” by Carlos Mario Ríos (@carlosmariorios), photographer and podcaster born in 1980, in Manizales, Colombia. is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.