This Is Why

Rather than try to top their peerless anthems, the band have instead uncovered a new warmth on ‘This Is Why’, and the effect is triumphant indeed.

Something about the songwriting on ‘This Is Why’ are undeniably the most something, Williams both elegant and sandpaper-coarse, depending on what is called for.

Just when you think they've hit an artistic plateau, they take another creative leap into the unknown, only to return with what feels like a deeper, more heartfelt statement of who they are. With This Is Why, Paramore underline that notion, pulling the artistic and emotional threads of their career into a cohesive, ardent whole.

It is an overall cohesive and grand statement of an album which opens with familiar sounds, and explores jutting, pointed off-shoots, before crescendoing with “Thick Skull”’s cataclysmic pop, all the while holding a relative level of self-involvement and privilege.

This Is Why is undoubtedly Paramore's strongest work. At only ten songs and a 36 minute runtime, they left little room for error and made not one mistake.

You get the feeling that Hayley Williams and the rest of Paramore are still looking more outwardly than inwardly — that the wisdom of age has left them wanting for more, and questioning all. And that’s a great look for Paramore.

There’s something satisfying about seeing the band creating in their own lane here in 2023 rather than fall into the all too easy trap of trying to recreate who they may have been in the past.

The project is very human and certainly the band’s most dynamic effort to date. Never has Paramore left so much space in its productions or allowed Williams to sound so sparse in moments, like her tiny frame might finally shatter. Nor has the band ever played so deftly with sounds of comfort and alarm, like a clock radio slicing through the most blissful dream.

Williams’s song C’est Comme Ça perfectly sums up the album: a reckoning with change, a refusal to deliver the same-old tricks even when it’s the easier option.

This Is Why is Paramore’s excellent foray into post-punk, riddled with a new set of anxieties — from witnessing global events to dealing with entering your thirties.

After releasing all the pent-up adrenaline in the album’s first half, Paramore’s melodies lumber likeably to a sludgier, shoegazier speed after that. But the band keep things interesting by accessorising that sound with a synth flute (on “Big Man, Little Dignity”); a rattle stick tap (on “You First”); a twinkling keyboard; and low horn effect (on “Figure 8”).

Truly emphasising how far they’ve come since emo’s heyday, these songs have as much (or more) in common with alt.pop icons like HAIM, Alanis Morissette or Fiona Apple as even they do with even Paramore’s poppiest ‘rock’ contemporaries like Fall Out Boy and Panic! At The Disco.

This Is Why stirs 00s alt-rock into the mix: the band have mentioned Bloc Party and Foals as influences. It’s not a combination that works without fail: there are tracks where the teaming of scratchy guitars and big pop hooks recalls the moment when the post-punk sound of 00s indie crashed into a Britpop-ish desire to make the BBC Radio 1 A-list, with irksome results – particularly on the single C’est Comme Ça. But you’re far more frequently struck by the deftness with which they weave the various aspects of their sound together.

Paramore have successfully remoulded the cornerstones of their music not only for the new times we find ourselves in, but also for a personal evolution, and maturity evident across This Is Why. [Mar 2023, p.76]

This Is Why, like After Laughter, suffers slightly from front-loading imbalance. The back half of the album feels tonally different from the front, more personal and relational and coming closer to their pop punk roots. It’s all well executed, however, and offers a glimpse into the ways we’ve all had to deal with the universal and the particular simultaneously in these last few years.

That dichotomy between the visceral and the lackadaisical defines This Is Why instead of its value as a snapshot of this decade's global chaos, and in that sense, this LP is neither their best nor their "most mature." Regardless, there's nothing to stop you from reveling in this album's own chaotic dynamics, seriousness and passiveness juxtaposed. It's a worthy if mildly disappointing addition to Paramore's canon.

Here, they sound self-assured and steady, like a group that understands what they have and makes the most of it.

Slight missteps do little to deter what is some of the band's most instantly likable tracks in their career, where they turn up one rave-up rocker after the next with wide-eyed fury. Having proven themselves time and time again, they've far outpaced those unwilling to grow up with them.