A Surprise Release of 17 Singles Captures Hayley Williams As a Superstar Two Decades In the Making

With no tracklist or sequence to adhere to, Ego is a grab-bag of enjoyment. But the miscellany is never reduced to randomness, only a curation of strengths. “Mirtazapine,” a tribute to anti-depressents (“you make me eat, you make me sleep”), uses lovey-dovey tropes to break containment. In a glaze of distorted guitars, Williams shouts to the heavens, “Who am I without you now?” Her voice strains the farther the instruments crawl. While “Zissou” offers a tame yet sensual respite, “Ego Death At a Bachelorette Party” takes a clever swipe at, presumably, Morgan Wallen (“I’m the biggest star at this racist country singer’s bar”). And if you’re looking for something that resembles Paramore’s style, the self-love treasure “Love Me Different” will put you front row. There, the band’s touring multi-instrumentalist Brian Robert Jones lends a lush montage of guitar and bass to Jones’ gooey synth programming, until Williams’ singing crests into a stirring repetition: “I want, I want, I want, I want, I want, I want.”

The scuzzy “Discovery Channel” not only features an interpolation of Bloodhound Gang’s “The Bad Touch,” but some of Williams’ best passages (“Barbaric bliss, teeth gnash when we kiss / No wound to lick, ‘cause the hurt is hidden”). Again, she points to her time with Atlantic (“Twenty-something years ago, we started playing a little game”) but transmutes it into a millennial yawp reckoning with multiple decades of hurt: “I can’t heal, you keep ripping me open.” The poison-tongued blood oath of “Brotherly Hate” (“nick your hand, spit into it, shake hands, that’s how you do it”) simmers into a lilt on the papercut-covered “Blood Bros.” The song—a softer, matured, 15-years-later sequel to “The Only Exception”—is Williams at her best. Lines like “‘till we’re just two fishes flipping on dry land” and “hook, line, and sinker, covered in sand” are earned in the afterglow of a couplet like “Filled to the brim, pour a little out each day / ‘Till it’s not quite empty, and we swim just above the drain.” When surrounded by carefully executed disses towards her old label, Williams’ beats of sincerity feel all the more celebratory.

The lovesick cinema of “Dream Girl In Shibuya,” the guitar-driven, tough-as-nails vibrato in “Hard,” and the hazy experimentation of “Negative Self Talk” all bend to Williams’ color. Her ambitions are distinct and contradictive. No two singles sound alike, and her lyrics have never been so towardly (see: “True Believer” and “Ego Death At a Bachelorette Party”). But Ego is at its best during “Whim” and “Glum,” both of which have the potential to be pop classics. On the latter, a menagerie of pitch-shifted vocals, guitar frolicking, rock drumming, and an early-aughts melody swirl while Williams gets candid about the malaise of aging, singing about what purpose awaits her: “On my way to 37 years, 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? I wonder.” Across the aisle, the heady “Whim” is ecstatic and masterful, as James’ tinsel synths and Williams’ roomy falsetto potently blend. It’s not the most revelatory chorus on Ego, but “I want to be in love, to believe in us, sans sabotage” is intoxicating—as are the soul-inflected guitar rumbles swaggering through the stamina of “Kill Me,” or the brooding, atmospheric overlays on Ben Kaufman’s strings during the Jim-E Stack-assisted, faith-stricken reactions of “True Believer.”

One can only hope that this approach to sharing music becomes contagious. Bands selling handmade cassette tapes at DIY shows isn’t front-page material anymore—though you can argue it never was—but it’s still unorthodox by industry standards, like dropping an album on a Wednesday or forgoing fanfare and promotion. Hayley Williams’ process here, to share a double album’s worth of tracks all at once, without much notice (except for early access granted to Good Dye Young customers), is certainly taboo as well. While her choice is still beholden to digital accessibility, it feels like a grassroots decision nonetheless—the mark of an independent artist making her first independent release unique. And, at a time when artists are consistently getting fucked over by bad streaming royalties, merch cuts, and a shrinking critical ecosystem, the slightest detours from the beaten path (especially the really good ones, like Ego) feel like miracles worth talking about.

Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Los Angeles.