When Paramore had been touring their debut album, followers assumed that the pop-punk upstarts from Tennessee had been straight edge due to the “X” they’d written on their palms. The reality was that every band member had been marked by venue workers as a result of they had been too younger to drink.
And so started the profession of a band who’ve been compelled to bat off rumours, half-truths and not-at-all-truths ever since, normally forged within the course of singer and de facto band chief Hayley Williams for having the temerity to be a girl fronting an emo band.
Nowadays, Williams is long-established as a totemic determine in alternative-pop and melodic, genre-fluid rock, however she was nonetheless discovering her ft again in 2005 when Paramore – at that time Williams and guitarist Josh Farro and his drummer brother Zak and bassist Jeremy Davis – launched their debut album All We Know Is Falling, which turns 20 this week.
The album will not be one in every of their greatest. In reality, as already coated in Louder’s rating of Paramore information, it’s in all probability their worst. But it surely stays a notable launch each for introducing one of many 21st century’s most enduring rock bands and capturing the giddy essence of ‘00s pop-punk.
It is a report that got here collectively in a interval when Paramore had been nonetheless understanding what and who they had been. Williams had initially been signed to Atlantic Information as a solo artist however fought in opposition to the label’s plans to show her right into a saccharine pop star, declaring she needed to type a rock band as an alternative. They’d solely been collectively a matter of months when work on All We Are Is Falling started.
It is not precisely an period that Williams appears to be like again on fondly. It didn’t take lengthy for the singer to grasp what she was up in opposition to. Go looking for any interview from the period and there shall be a query just like the one which opens an interview from long-defunct music and movie website The Trades: “Hayley, is it any harder being a woman on the Warped tour?”.
On the time, Williams was joyful to declare one thing alongside the traces of ’No, it’s not, every part is nice’, however wanting again years later, she opened up on the rampant misogyny encountered by her 18-year-old self. “I didn’t understand how poisonous that world may very well be,” she advised Vulture a couple of years in the past.
“The pop-punk and emo scene within the early 2000s. It was brutally misogynistic,” she continued. “A whole lot of internalised sexism, and even whenever you had been fortunate sufficient to fulfill different bands who had been sort and respectful, there was different shit that wasn’t. And I used to be actually feisty. We received provided Warped tour, and there was a caveat: “It’s a stage referred to as the Shiragirl Stage. It’s all feminine.” I used to be pissed! I needed to qualify for an actual stage. Once I’ve been provided feminine alternatives, it looks like a backhanded praise. However folks generally assume that’s anti-feminist, that I don’t wanna be grouped in with the ladies. As a 16-year-old who had goals of taking part in with the large boys, it felt like we had been being slighted. That summer time we went out, and I’ll always remember [it]. We performed in Florida, and the stage was a truck that had a flatbed on it. It was so flimsy it might shake and disintegrate. There may need been one different feminine in a band [on tour], and other people had been gawking. I don’t assume in a pervy method. They had been confused, like, ‘What’s on this for me? What’s she singing about? I’m a man — how do I relate?’
While All We Know Is Falling hardly set the world alight on the time of launch, the success of its 2007 follow-up Riot!, which went to Quantity 15 within the US Billboard chart, belatedly shone a lightweight on it. It could ultimately be licensed Gold in 2014, 9 years after its launch. By that time, the tumultuous world of Paramore had thrown up extra hurdles for Williams to navigate with disgruntled ex-bandmates writing mean-spirited blogs criticising how the band was run and, erm, additionally saying that a few of Williams’ lyrics had been “ungodly”. Inside turmoil was by no means distant from Paramore.
However Williams persevered, and there was a sense of hard-won triumph when she posted a handwritten be aware forward of Paramore’s headline efficiency at When We Had been Younger competition in Las Vegas in 2022. The occasion described itself as “an epic line-up of emo and rock bands from the previous 20 years” and forward of the present, Williams was in an understandably reflective temper almost about how arduous she’d fought to be accepted in a scene through which Paramore had been now on the high desk.
“To develop up on this scene was not a easy factor,” Willams wrote on Instagram. “To be celebrating it (and to be celebrated by it) will not be a easy factor. Nothing about this life – for you, me, or anybody – is straightforward… We fell in love with this subset of post-punk and hardcore doubtless as a result of nothing else moved us. We didn’t match elsewhere. To be a younger lady in love with this scene was to have the hope that I’d discover my very own approach to belong. It took years to search out that belonging. It’s taken quite a lot of unlearning. A whole lot of untangling knots I didn’t even know had been there. What I did know was that for each ‘Take off your high!’ or snarky punkzine assessment… For each dramatic headline pinned on my identify, or any season of self-doubt… Nobody was going to outline Paramore however Paramore.”
Persevering with, she stated, “Practically 20 years later, we discover ourselves a pillar of the very scene that threatened to reject us. And me… Fuck those who doubted!”
Who is aware of if Hayley Williams would’ve saved at it if somebody had handed her an inventory of each of fall-out and controversy coming Paramore’s method again in 2005. However as All We Know Is Falling turns 20, she’s properly inside her rights to really feel like she gained the battle. For that cause alone, it’s a debut value celebrating.