Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic
When do trimmings become the main course? Or, to pose it in employment terms: When does a side hustle became the real hustle? And can that just go down without a hitch?
These are just ways into trying to think about developments in the career of Hayley Williams , who easily sold out two shows this week at the Hollywood Bowl , something we wouldn’t necessarily have taken for granted for her as a solo artist even a couple of years ago. In the first of two nights there Monday, Williams performed for almost exactly two hours without doing a single Paramore song — and what’s remarkable is, nobody cared.
Well, maybe that’s an overstatement: Probably someone out there in the full house of 17,000 had read the promo material for the tour and figured the promise of material from her three solo albums “plus exciting surprises” at least left room for the possibility of a Paramore or tune or two. But the “exciting surprises” on Monday amounted to a Portishead cover and a surprise encore appearance by Zedd, as opposed to “That’s What You Get.” Which was fine. More than fine, really: Williams’ Bowl set made for one of the most satisfying rock shows you could see this year, regardless of the fact that the only misery business being transacted was the unusually sweltering October weather that had everyone present walking up in a sweat.
Speaking of boiling, this all boils down to: What a difference a single album can make. For Williams, that album was 2025’s “Ego Death at a Bachelorette Party,” which she originally dribbled out in mysterious spurts like it was a bunch of between-project demos before everyone gradually realized that it added up to the game-changer project of her career. Five months ago or so, she did a tour of small theaters (see Variety ‘s review of her May L.A. show at the Wiltern ) in which the setlist consisted primary of all 20 tracks from “Ego Death,” plus an excerpt of “Please Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood” as a bonus mission statement. For anyone who caught that mini-tour, which felt surprisingly closer to a full meal than a teaser, it’s no surprise that this current fall amphitheater run feels like a decent summation of a long-building repertoire, rather than the shorter sliver of her life’s work to date that she’s actually offering.
Part of the pleasure Williams is clearly taking in this current outing is that she’s getting to tour behind two albums at once — not just “Ego Death,” which she’s now doing 12 tracks from, but a good 10 from “Petals for Armor,” the 2020 album that she’d planned to follow up wih a debut solo tour before the pandemic changed plans. Perhaps it shouldn’t be a huge shock that, in contrast, she only picked one selection from the album that came between these two, 2021’s “Flowers for Vases/Descansos,” an album so flagrantly somber it felt like a side project among side projects. But the one “Vases” song that did get performed, “Just a Lover,” got an interesting spot — or spots, since solemn excerpts from it were played by her at the piano to open the show and then be reprised at the close of the main set, perhaps as a reminder of how un-perky her music could be if she let more depressing thoughts take over. (One of the despondent lines from that song, “No more music for the masses,” was emblazoned on one of the shirts sold at the merch stand, proving that the singer maintains a fine-tuned sense of irony.)
Williams can be plenty downbeat, lyrically, at least, even when she’s keeping those other “Flowers for Vases” songs locked in the closet. And it was telling, in some way, that the one cover song she has added to this tour is Portishead’s “Wandering Star,” which is literally the farthest thing from sunny, with its grief-stricken verses and “The blackness of darkness forever” refrain — performed with Williams hovering over an old-school-looking computer bank to produce those sounds, as seen in a direct-overhead shot on the Bowl’s big screens. She did mean to take a bit to get the party started, as that descent into celestial bleakness was only the third song in the set. But then the cheerful “Hayley Williams Show” logo appeared on screen, as if we had just passed through an extended pre-credits sequence. “Simmer,” a “Petals” song that is one of her most emotional and vivid, followed, with its message that one way out from a traumatic relationship is to embrace a righteous rage.
Williams took till the sixth song, “Ice in My OJ,” to finally broach the “Ego Death” album and some of its less soul-scouring material. (The song’s already ambiguous “I’m in a band!” chant takes on further layers, now that she’s out on the road with a pretty great assembly of musicians, that isn’t Paramore.) “Kill Me” quickly followed as one of her best current anthemic singalongs — not as nihilistic as it sounds, so much as just having some playful, emotionally exhausted fun twisting around Nietzsche’s overquoted words. “Hard” followed — her brutally honest look at the baggage around the feminine mystique, and the no-win situations that come with being a Woman in Rock. “My Friend” found her putting on a mask, literally, as a makeup person came out to affix glitter and paint around her eyes, as seen in extreme camera closeups, allowing her to look Mardi Gras-ready for the rest of the night, even if the actual party on stage had its emo ebbs and flows.
The poignant “Leave It Alone” saw the arrival of a female string quartet that periodically reappeared throughout the set — and also the intriguing use of a polyrhythm complex enough that you had to remind yourself it was your mind that was out of time, not the band itself. After this, Williams took time out between songs to celebrate the audience’s approval of all the “Petals for Amor” songs, like “Leave It Alone,” that had provided the majority of the set thus far, half-seriously remarking that the whole tour was a “Trojan horse” to get to finally play that material.
Among the “Petals for Armor” songs in the set that were performed without comment: “Dead Horse,” a song understood to be about her relationship with former husband Chad Gilbert. As fans had noted, she took it out of the set for three concerts following his death last month, apparently out of respect, but it’s back in, because history is history, and relational trauma transformed into a sing-along dance track is always a recipe for concert success.
Truth be told, as much cathartic fun as “Dead Horse” is — tempered by recent events or otherwise — there’s not a track on her more recent record that doesn’t beat it. And the second half of the show really soared as she uppped the “Ego Death at a Bachelorette Party” quotient, including the title track, which had footage of Nashville’s Lower Broadway logjams projected onto not just the stage but the Bowl’s entire proscenium. “Turns out he’s the least of our problems in Nashville,” she quipped, apparently referring to Morgan Wallen, the presumed “racist country singer” whose bar she visits in the tune, without expounding on who or what is even worse. “God bless Dolly Parton,” she added, bringing up a more universally beloved ambassador from her home state. Related Stories Reba McEntire Says She Missed a Call from Dolly Parton Before Her Death and ‘Couldn’t’ Get Back in Touch: ‘I’ll Never Know Why She Called’ Kacey Musgraves Pays Heartfelt Tribute to Dolly Parton With 'I Will Always Love You' Performance at MTV Video Music Awards
Earlier, she’d gotten as political as she was going to during “Ice in My OJ,” popping in between lines to exclaim “Fuck ICE!” and “Free Palestine,” as is her nightly custom. (She expounded a bit more in her Instagram account earlier Monday. There’d been some news pickup of her “Fuck ICE” commentary at an earlier show, to which the White House officially responded, “America is grateful all the time for our federal law enforcement officers who keep us safe. We suggest Ms. Williams to (sic) thank them for their service, not belittle their sacrifice.” The singer replied to the presidents team on IG: “And may I suggest all Nazi bitches suck on my fat dick.”)
Sadly, nothing she had to say at the Bowl was quite as colorful as what she has told the Trump administration on social media. But she did introduce “True Believer,” the recent song where she reckons with her own Southern heritage, the way she does each night on tour, saying: “The biggest threat to American democracy is Christian nationalism.” This standout number was conceived and is performed as a broadside against the hypocrisy she has spoken about growing up around in Tennessee; buried within it, plaintively, is a very sad gospel song.
Williams was definitely letting her ex-vangelical freak flag fly on Monday night. She performed in a white mini-dress adorned by six apparently hand-drawn devil faces on the front, and a bigger and more sketched-in devil’s head on the back… all just above the cross inked on her upper thigh. At the end of her solo-piano cover of the Nina Simone/Animals classic “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood,” she put her hands to her head and used her fingers to form devil horns, which were writ large onto a background screen by a spotlight in the foreground making a silhouette. She won’t be the last church kid to be working out some issues literally in a spotlight.
Does she count as a punk? The question arose in my mind the other week just because she used a statement she issued after her ex-husband’s death to thank him for helping introduce her to the hardcore scene, back when she was a teenager. Now, although pop-punk has been a reasonable loose description for some of Paramore’s music in the past, “hardcore” is not how you’d likely think of her distinctly melodic and flavorful music, then or now. But seeing her in action (or reading her in action, when she’s taking on Trump’s people), the influence is very much discernible, in her attitude. From her homemade dress to her literal stance on stage, Williams is a rock ‘n’ roller, regardless of what style of music she’s exploring in a particular song — even the nostalgic bubblegum of the night’s penultimate number, her and Zedd’s 2013 collaboration “Stay the Night,” a reminder of a time when her fangs were a little more hidden.
(If we want to use punk-rock purely as a term of endearment, there is something of a punk ethos to Williams’ commitment to keeping tickets relatively low-priced and difficult to scalp, too, via the Face Value program. Even though tickets immediately sold out months ago, most of the good ones coming in around a reasonable $130, on the day of the show it was easy to find some resale tickets at that same value, due to the measures put in place, which ultimately contributed to the feel-good quality of the gig.)
After her aside with Zedd, Williams brought things back to the now with the nightly closer, one of the best songs from “Ego Death,” “Parachute,” one of those numbers that manages to sound ecstatic and defeated at the same time, with its “I thought you were gonna catch me!” chorus. Is she singing to a friend in that song? Or maybe to Mirtazapine (the subject of another great encore inclusion)? Even a favorite med can let you down. Popular on Variety
That finale number had a tinge of hard-earned bitterness, but at the same time, it’s really a glorification of hard-earned self-sufficiency. Which is not a bad message to send a crowd of mostly young people out with… and a little bit appropriate for the state of her own career, where suddenly she is… bigger than Paramore? Is that possible? Maybe not, in the most realistic sense. But you do get the feeling that, with her first two solo albums, she was trying to dance outside the edges of what that band would do, and now, with this latest one and its subsequent tours, she isn’t afraid to keep it intensely personal but also take it bigger and broader, without worrying whether it steps on the toes of her other gig by getting too raucous, or too rock.
Not to negate the other thing, which you get the feeling could come back in a couple of years, or never, or some time in between. You can believe that the stuff she’s doing now is as good as she’s gotten, and still think it’d be fun to see Paramore reconvene and play the Bowl, too, some time down the road. Right now, anyway, it’s Hayley Williams’ bachelorette party, and the favors are tremendous.
Setlist for Hayley Williams at the Hollywood Bowl, Oct. 5, 2026:
Source: Entertainment
Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic When do trimmings become the main course? Or, to pose it in employment terms: When does a side ...
