Spectreview: Hayley Williams – Petals For Armor

Hayley Williams’ first solo record finds the Paramore singer in her element, laying down one smartly-crafted pop song after another.

-LIGHT GREEN-

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“I’m alive in spite of me
And I’m on the move
So come and look inside of me
Watch me while I bloom”

Ironically, the pop world is not a playground. Like the industry it supports, It’s strict and regimented, unsurprisingly workmanlike. Often it’s a crapshoot to determine which pop artists actually have creative autonomy over their careers, despite what PR managers would claim otherwise.

One thing you can confidently say about Hayley Williams, despite the lineup controversies surrounding Paramore and the accusations of management manipulation, is that she doesn’t compromise what she wants to play. She might have been another Top 40 songstress had she not insisted, at 14, on writing her own pop-punk songs. Almost two decades later she’s built a reputation as an openly positive force in popular music, able at the very least to take ownership of her artistic successes.

Is her first solo album after all these years an artistic success? Overall, very much so. Paramore’s self-titled fourth album established Williams as a confidant genre hopper, a trait that’s especially important in an era that highly values the ability to hop genres. Petals for Armor is similarly boundless. It’s still a pop record, which means it’s chock full of contemporary pop songwriting structures, but Williams (and co-writers Taylor York and Joey Howard) keeps the record fresh not necessarily by imitating other styles directly – styles that range from Bad Bunny’s reggaeton (“Dead Horse”) to Lady Gaga’s atonal verses (“Sugar”) to the nu-disco of Dua Lipa’s recently fantastic Future Nostalgia  (twin treasures “Over Yet” and “Pure Love”) to the hypnagogic pop of acts like Men I Trust (“Why We Ever”) – but by melding them all into a melange that’s unique to her discography. Much of the arrangements on the record are drier and more restrained than a lot of her previous work, and its greatest success lean the heaviest in that direction. This includes its earliest numbers, like the sultry swing of “Leave It Alone” and lead single “Simmer,” which, akin to its namesake, constantly threatens to bubble over in anger.

Such restraint also can’t hide the youthful pop-punk verve that sticks to Williams’ vocals like a fingerprint. Today’s pop may be a little more, shall we say, dispassionate than what Williams delivers on Petals for Armor, but that arguably makes her performances stand out in that context. She also makes smart decisions concerning her individual deliveries, gamely matching the disparate gaps between verse and chorus on some songs (check out her versatility on the bipolar “Creepin’” and “Sudden Desire”) and only busting out into a shout when needed (her Björk-like cry on the boygenius-featuring “Rose/Lotus/Violet/Iris” is pretty spectacular). Lyrically, while she’s always leaned on the literal side of poetry, her words are less distractingly cheesy than ever, even poignant at times.

Honestly, despite its length and its handful of clunkier tracks, Petals for Armor is a goddamn buffet of smartly-crafted pop music. Every track feels like turning a corner into a different city. They might all be recognizable places, but it’s the journey that ultimately matters. On that note, this record is nothing if not a marker of Hayley Williams’ own journey, the Warped Tours and label pressures and tour rigors that she endured, that cumulatively led her to her greatest work yet.

Recommended for natural hair color.