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Hayley Williams swaggers on stage with a guitar and begins gleefully raging about her antidepressant of choice. Mirtazapine, a pop-punk ode to the drug that “makes me eat” and “makes me sleep”, swiftly rouses the audience into a boisterous singalong. Her chemistry with the crowd is so potent that it’s easy to forget this is Williams’s first London gig since supporting Taylor Swift on The Eras Tour with her band Paramore in 2024, and her first ever European tour as a solo artist. “I remember so many of you,” she says, beaming at the crowd. She points at someone in the front row: “You came on stage [for] Misery Business.”
For years, Williams had vowed to never pursue solo music. In fact, when she landed a deal with Atlantic Records at 14, it was on her insistence that she’d make music as part of a band. Now finally released from the contract she signed as a teenager, the 37-year-old’s third solo record, Ego Death at a Bachelorette Party, was a grief-stricken reflection on lost loves and lost innocence. On stage, she appears to heal those wounds with soulful artistry. A daring cover of Nina Simone’s Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood leaves the room in silence; a brief snippet of Didn’t Cha Know by Erykah Badu prefaces her viral hit Good Ol’ Days.
Make no mistake, Williams is still excellent at headbanging – glorious, explosive and totally unfettered. The show’s highlights come when those punk and R&B instincts intertwined: powerhouse vocal runs towards the end of the angsty Kill Me, for example, or the unhinged, megaphone-assisted screams of I’m in a Band! that interrupt the subtle grooves of Ice in My OJ. Throughout it all ran a theme of resistance, from the explicit anti-fascist lyrics of True Believer, which critiques white nationalism in the southern US, to Williams’s refusal to let her demons defeat her. “It’s been really fun to play these songs and give them a life that isn’t … just depressing,” she says at one point, before letting out an outrageous cackle. Hayley Williams gets the last laugh – and roaring cheers from the crowd.
