It’s hard to say how much Hayley Williams has been alone since the age of thirteen, when she and her mom fled to Nashville. She describes arriving in Tennessee as the moment when “everything opened up”– her stardom became undeniable as she found solace, passion, and community in a group of boys that would become Paramore. But those opportunities, while expanding her life, also came to be the most insulating. Touring nonstop is visibility and distraction at its most addicting. Though Williams swore to never go solo, the seemingly insignificant technicality of hers being the only name on their Atlantic Records contract would bleed into every controversy regarding Williams as a frontwoman and the string of changes to the bands makeup in the almost twenty years since their conception. It’s ironic then, that her hesitant but necessary choice to release not just one, but two solo albums over the pandemic (and a short Paramore hiatus) is where we find her most exposed.
While her first solo record, Petals for Armor, expresses the self-revelatory and rewarding moments of isolation induced reflection, FLOWERS for VASES/descansos captures the ugly truth of reflecting on the parts of ourselves we never dare touch for fear that recognition might allow them more power. Williams takes us through a journey of her grieving process for her tumultuous relationship and divorce with Chad Gilbert of New Found Glory, starting with the sentiment that moving on is perhaps the most painful part. Exemplifying a complicated relationship with the past and present on the album’s opener, “First Thing to Go,” she asks, “Why do memories glow the way real moments don’t?”
Williams digs deeper into the reality of her loss midway through the tracklist on “Good Grief,” where she finds herself face to face with the parts of heartbreak that are far too brutal to be romanticized. She sings about how facing such an intensity of emotions shamelessly reveals the most human of desires: sex and hunger. Gently crooning, “There’s no such thing as good grief, haven’t eaten in three weeks…There’s no such thing as good grief, sleep with you in a sex dream.”
For the first time in her career, we find Williams as not just a solo artist but as the only writer and performer on this entire record. As a result, instrumentation is sparse, used with care and intention to establish an emotional landscape for Williams to place her masterful command of melody on top of. Seventh chords make an appearance on almost every song, constantly swaying between major and minor, allowing only a vague hint of whether each song takes place in misery fueled by love or love fueled by misery.
Stripped down instrumentals lend themselves to William’s pen at its most honest, poetic, and at times, straightforwardly piercing. Across an entire album, however, it’s easy to hear how the rest of Paramore is vital to filling in the spaces where Williams lacks in sonic expertise. Especially on a record lyrically willing to claw through the dirty and raw parts heartbreak, I can’t help but long for the rage and passion so often exemplified in the heavy yet catchy guitar riffs and pulsating rhythmic backbone of Paramore’s genre twisting amalgamation of pop-punk, alternative rock, and synth pop sound. The band’s ability to effectively embrace genre shifts relies on the consistency of William’s vocal gravitas and melodic instinct, but on her own, FLOWERS is left a bit static in sonic coloring.
The record ends with a kind of yearning for love that only distance affords us. William’s leaves with the hunger to hold intimacy close again, whether out of desperation or hope, with rougher hands or a slippery grip. The album’s closer, “Just a Lover,” is the first and only time on the album we hear the powerful belt we are so accustomed to hearing from Williams, as she screams, “In the morning, I feel my heart crack open, one last chorus…No more music for the masses.” The song’s existential color and sudden breaking open, after an almost off puttingly controlled display of craft on every song prior, gives us a taste of what’s to come on the next Paramore record, This is Why.
While FLOWERS can be a bit stagnant in terms of dynamics and energy, part of Williams venturing into solo artistry is the freedom for one album to be just that–one album & one moment. If you’d like to hear the Paramore frontwoman dancing at the top of her range to floods of electric guitar, heavy percussion, and fizzy synths, there are six other albums to consult. But, if you would like to be dropped and swallowed into the stomach of her grief, discovery, and dismantling– there is this one.
