Hayley Williams was a 13-year-old kid with a big voice when she moved from Mississippi to Tennessee and attracted the attention of music industry figures who thought she had a future as a solo star. Instead, Williams wanted to start a punk band with a few Tennessee teenagers, and over the next few years, Paramore became a fixture of MTV and major festivals, with guitarists Josh Farro and Taylor York, bassist Jeremy Davis, and drummer Zac Farro.
After going platinum with emo and punk pop anthems like “Misery Business” and “Ignorance” and introducing the danceable grooves of later hits like “Ain’t It Fun” and “Hard Times,” Paramore grew into an increasingly eclectic and adventurous band that appeals across genres and generations. But that musical evolution has come along with frequent lineup changes as some of Williams’s bandmates have departed, returned, or engaged in public mudslinging and legal battles.
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After the dust settled, the trio of Williams, York, and Zac Farro decided to keep Paramore going. With 2017’s After Laughter and 2023’s This is Why, the band made two albums with the same lineup for the first time, and Williams and York have become both a couple and a formidable songwriting partnership. The band has been on hiatus since their last tour concluded in 2024, but Williams has kept busy collaborating with Turnstile, David Byrne, and Moses Sumney, while Zac Farro released his debut solo album Operator earlier this month.
Paramore’s debut album All We Know Is Falling was released on July 26, 2005, so for its 20th anniversary we’ve ranked everything the band has released over the past two decades. And since Williams has been the only member of Paramore to appear on all the band’s albums, her two solo albums have also been included in the countdown.
10. Re: This is Why (2023)
When a rock band makes a remix album, it’s often a chance to set their riffs to beats from the worlds of dance music or hip-hop. Re: This is Why, on the other hand, helped complete Paramore’s gradual transformation into an indie rock band that’s peers with remixers including Panda Bear, Bartees Strange, and Julien Baker. In fact, the greatest shortcoming of this collection is how little it reveals about the songs, which are often paired with artists they somewhat resembled to begin with—it doesn’t take much to turn “C’est Comme Ca” into a Wet Leg song or “The News” into a Linda Lindas song. Still, it’s worth hearing for a great previously unreleased song, “Sanity,” which appears both as a demo and as a remix by Jack Antonoff.
9. The Final Riot! (2008)
The first time I saw Paramore live was at a festival in Baltimore in 2008, playing a shorter version of the set they’d record in Chicago two days later for their only live album. So The Final Riot! very easily conjures my own firsthand memories of Williams shouting and pumping the crowd up like a tiny rock god, and the band’s energetic extended intro for “Born For This.” Paramore became a better live band in the years that followed, but The Final Riot! captures them at a pivotal moment when they were starting to really get comfortable onstage. And you can hear how strong Paramore’s bond with their fans had already become when the crowd loudly sings along with “For a Pessimist, I’m Pretty Optimistic,” or when Williams adds an acoustic arrangement of “My Heart” back into the setlist at the request of the band’s Livejournal community.
8. All We Know Is Falling (2005)
Paramore were never really a textbook emo band, but All We Know Is Falling is their most scene-friendly record, full of brooding songs inspired by the divorce of Williams’s parents and Davis’s abrupt departure from the band shortly before sessions for the album. The studio version of “My Heart,” a screamo detour with Josh Farro contributing “unclean” vocals, sticks out like a sore thumb in the band’s catalog now. The members of Paramore ranged in age from 15 to 17 when the album was released, though, and “Conspiracy” and “Pressure” were impressive efforts for rookie songwriters. “The problem here is the structure of the songs, they’re just too flat, too linear. A voice like that needs some real dynamic musicianship behind it, and it’s sorely lacking on All We Know Is Falling,” Jordan Rogowski wrote in the PunkNews.org review of the album.
7. Flowers for Vases / Descansos by Hayley Williams (2021)
Williams was about to embark on her first tour as a solo artist in spring 2020 when COVID-19 arrived and virtually all concerts were put on hold. Unable to go on the road to promote Petals for Armor, Williams hunkered down and kept recording at home in Nashville, this time playing all the instruments for a true solo album with no other musicians. Flowers for Vases / Descansos is charmingly intimate and homemade—“HYD” begins with an amusing false start as a vocal take is interrupted by a plane flying overhead—and her proficiency on guitar, piano, and drums is well beyond what Paramore fans may have realized. It’s so much quieter than anything else she’s made that it stands apart and is perhaps easily overlooked, but the lyrics are intensely introspective and revealing, and the album builds beautifully to the singalong closer “Just a Lover.”
6. This Is Why (2023)
Former Reel Big Fish drummer Carlos de la Garza worked with Paramore as a mixer and recording engineer for a decade before producing their sixth album. Instead of tapping into their shared Warped Tour roots, though, Paramore and their producer looked to a very different strain of mid-2000s rock, the jagged post-punk of bands like Bloc Party and the Rapture, for the sound of This Is Why. It’s an unapologetically angry and political record, but there’s still wit and pop hooks to be found in the self-deprecating “Running Out of Time.”
5. After Laughter (2017)
After Laughter combines some of the darkest lyrics and brightest sonics in the Paramore catalog, as they returned with Zac Farro back in the fold for an album full of pessimistic sentiments and Reagan-era new wave textures to offer their take on the state of the world during the first Trump administration. “Fake Happy” brilliantly epitomizes the album’s ethos of smiling on the outside and crying on the inside, and After Laughter feels more like an aesthetic experiment than an attempt to repeat the success of “Ain’t It Fun.” It made perfect sense when David Byrne covered After Laughter’s lead single “Hard Times” in 2024, because Talking Heads are such a clear touchstone for the album, along with a host of other ’80s bands that combined synth pop hooks with lyrics about the anxieties of modern life. “The hooks are big and the detailing is sublime, at times borrowing from unexpected sources,” Maura Johnston wrote in the Rolling Stone review of After Laughter.
4. Brand New Eyes (2009)
The internal tensions within Paramore were already starting to make headlines with canceled shows and breakup rumors in 2008. But the band pulled together with seasoned stadium punk producer Rob Cavallo (Green Day, My Chemical Romance) to make some optimistic rockers like “Looking Up” on Brand New Eyes, the last album before the Farro brothers left the band. “Careful” and “Brick by Boring Brick” are some of the band’s fastest, sharpest songs, but York, finally a full-fledged member of Paramore, co-wrote some of the moodier, more textured songs that expanded the band’s sound like the haunting acoustic track “Misguided Ghosts” and the soaring “All I Wanted,” which belatedly went viral on TikTok in 2020.
3. Petals for Armor by Hayley Williams (2020)
Williams made some early guest appearances outside Paramore on glossy hits like rapper B.o.B’s “Airplanes” and dance producer Zedd’s “Stay the Night,” leading some to speculate that she’d eventually make straight-up pop music as a solo artist. When she finally released a solo album nearly a decade later, however, Petals for Armor turned out to be a quirky art rock record that felt like a natural extension of Paramore’s later work, with York and Zac Farro both contributing to the album. “Dead Horse” directly comments on her struggles with depression and her divorce from New Found Glory guitarist Chad Gilbert, but Petals for Armor feels like a fearless, sonically dense journey to self-acceptance that ends on a hopeful note with songs like “Watch Me While I Bloom” and “Crystal Clear.”
2. Riot! (2007)
The slut-shaming parts of “Misery Business” haven’t aged well, and Williams has occasionally apologized for the song, purged it from the band’s setlists, or simply avoided singing certain lines. Nevertheless, it’s one of the most potent pop punk hits of the 21st century, capturing a moment of emotional truth despite a little political incorrectness, and it’s hard to imagine a better song to introduce Paramore to the mainstream. Riot! is a tornado of power chords and drum fills, and “Born For This” and “That’s What You Get” are high points of the early days when the Farro brothers were the band’s musical engine. “This melodic Tennessee foursome deliver everything that a group of new-school mall punks angling for the big time should—massive guitar riffs, sweetly infectious choruses, and soaring power ballads,” Trevor Kelley wrote in the SPIN review of Riot!
1. Paramore (2013)
Since the very beginning, the members of Paramore have often spoken of their love of the ’90s cult band Failure, and the band’s frontman Ken Andrews was invited to help mix and play on Paramore’s self-titled album, which really bore Failure’s audible influence on the spacey guitar architecture of “Be Alone” and “Future.” The 17-track album explodes in just about every possible creative direction the band had hinted at in previous records, as if the departure of Josh and Zac Farro had liberated the remaining members to reinvent Paramore. Somehow, the odd mix of styles hangs together well, from the transcendent funk pop of the band’s first Top 10 hit “Ain’t It Fun” to the dark satire of the doo wop pastiche “(One of Those) Crazy Girls,” and three brief, whimsical tracks that feature Williams commenting on the band’s lineup change drama while York strums a ukulele. With a supporting cast including producer Justin Meldal-Johnsen (M83, Neon Trees) and drummer Ilan Rubin (Nine Inch Nails, Angels & Airwaves), Paramore made its most adventurous album, but also proved they were still a great pop punk band on “Anklebiters.”
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