Your already sweaty summer just got hotter thanks to a surprise drop from Paramore‘s Hayley Williams. The singer posted 17 new songs on her website over the weekend, with fans awarded access to the fresh tracks via a code from Williams’ Good Dye Young hair dye company.
Once entered, the code takes you to a rudimentary site featuring a pile of MP3 links to tracks including the meditative “True Believer” and “KillMe,” as well as the acoustic ballads “BloodBros,” “IWon’tQuitOnYou” and “NegativeSelfTalk” and the sunshiny pop bops “EDAABP” and “BrotherlyHate.” The songs mostly have a home made, confessional feel to them, with Williams dipping into a quasi-hip-hop cadence on the at-turns float-y and scream-y “IceInMyOJ” and performing over what sounds like a drum machine beat on the mid-tempo rocker “Hard,” on which she sings, “I got married once in combat losing/ Only listen to testosterone music/ I had to kill my feminine just to do it/ To get to you, I had to go through you.”
At press time Williams had not commented further on the release, including revealing if it is meant as a full, proper follow-up to either her 2020 debut solo album, Petals for Armor, or its more folk-tinged 2021 sequel, Flowers for Vases/ Descansos.
In addition to the new songs, the site features a “Misc” folder packed with a 2017 performance clip from Monterrey, Mexico, as well as what looks like a lyric sheet, a snap of a “Hayley Williams is my favorite band” T-shirt and a brief audio clip of a child saying, “I’m sorry that you’re going through something hard.”
Among the other songs in the pop-up collection are: “DisappearingMan,” “Whim,” “True Believer,” “Glum,” “LoveMeDifferent,” “DreamGirlInShibuya,” “Zissou” and “DisoveryChannel,” which features a lyrical ode to the chorus from Bloodhoud Gang’s 1999 hit “The Bad Touch.”
Earlier this year, Williams released the Moses Sumney collab “I Like It I Like It” and last week she debuted the Liz Phair-esque rocker “Mirtazapine” — an ode to the antidepressant commonly known as Remeron — on Nashville Public Radio’s WNXP, less than a week after the Republican-led Congress voted to pull back more than $1 billion in funds for NPR and PBS. She also performed the song live for the first time with Jack Antonoff’s Bleachers at the Newport Folk Festival on Friday.
