Paramore — After Laughter


Fueled By Ramen | discogs.com
Juxtaposition 101: sober content against a vibrant backdrop 

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“Tell me how to feel about you now /
Let me know”

Despite its fizzy eighties pop-punk trimmings, Paramore’s fifth studio album is enveloped in a thick, damp mist of resignation. The dissonance between the two is pretty weird, and deeply engrossing.

Unrest permeates every facet of After Laughter: it is implied in angular guitar figures, it is displayed in refusal to resolve melodies, and it is constantly invoked in the most achingly disinterested lyrics of Hayley Williams’ career.

“You see a floodlit form /
I see a shirt design
/
I'm no savior of yours /
And you're no friend of mine”

She soared on the heat of righteous anger, cackling like a banshee, middle fingers jutting high into the sky like great celestial glowsticks. But on After Laughter, the updraft has died. This is not the same Williams who screamed and shrieked and yowled her way through ferocious anthems of independence and incompatibility. This is not the same pint-sized pop star who rained down fire with Paramore’s blistering self-titled album all the way back in the distant halcyon days of 2013.

The flames have cooled. The joy has been snuffed out. She is exhausted, drained, tired — awake.

“And they say that dreaming is free /
But I wouldn’t care what it cost me”

The whiplash is brutal, and the comedown is harsh. All the shiny accoutrements that so flattered Paramore’s Paramore — the scorching stadium-ready guitar riffs, the glossy vibraphone chimes, the gentle decade-hopping balladry, that blazing production — have been swept away. They seemed at the time to herald renewed self-confidence, a refreshed sense of direction and purpose. But After Laughter tips its hand, and finally concedes some honesty. There is only a woman, nudging thirty, still trying to find herself. And Christ, is that depressing.

“If I smile with my teeth /
I think I believe me”

You’re not fooling anyone, Hayley. And I think that’s the point.