Hayley Williams - Ego Death At A Bachelorette Party

With Hayley Williams’ latest solo effort - now officially known as ‘Ego Death At A Bachelorette Party’, she has breathed a new lease of life into the more static confines of the idea of an album, shifting things in a manner not too dissimilar to that of Radiohead on their 2007 pay-what-you-want LP ‘In Rainbows’. Releasing the record’s then-17 tracks without an official tracklist - and entirely for free, through her password-encoded, nostalgia-loaded website - her latest solo work became an opportunity for fan collaboration, with thousands of different playlists and configurations popping up within a few days.

It’s perhaps only because the record is so musically varied and rich that this approach could yield such extensive results; a real pro of its meandering, 18-track runtime. A running of the gamut through Williams’ huge wealth of musical influences, ‘EDAABP’ never quite settles into a rhythm, instead twisting and turning in satisfying sonic directions to fit the mood of each new emotion present. And there are emotions aplenty here. From the lackadaisical rage that sizzles through opener ‘Ice In My OJ’ (“A lot of dumb motherfuckers that I made rich,” she dedicates, presumably to higher ups at Paramore’s former label home), to the dark self-examination of ‘Negative Self Talk’ - all via the near-constant hum of doubt and sadness in the wake of a relationship’s breakdown - our narrator finds herself continually traversing through darkness in search of light.

It’s an album that feels intensely nostalgic in moments (take the scuzzy Riot Grrrl squalls of ‘Mirtazapine’, or the creeping, hypnotic ‘Kill Me’), and yet immensely arresting in others (the vocoded vocals of ‘Glum’; her downtuned riff of Bloodhound Gang’s ‘The Bad Touch’ in ‘Discovery Channel’ ). It’s the devastating final one-two of ‘…I Won’t Quit On You’ and ‘Parachute’, however, that best summarises the album’s immense power. Moving from the quietly gorgeous dedication of the former, through to the thrashing, gut-punch of the closer is a blistering display of the complexity of grief, with ‘Parachute’’s second verse feeling especially desperate and wounded: “And you were at my wedding, I was broken, you were drunk / You could’ve told me not to do it, I would’ve run, I would’ve run”. A metaphorical opening of wounds in the most visceral way.

The fact that Hayley Williams is an eloquent, evocative songwriter has never been in doubt, but with ‘EDAABP’ in all its sprawling scale, she proves just how far-reaching and all-encompassing her talents really are.