If there’s nothing else for us to look forward to in the increasingly bleak context we’re currently living in, we’ll still have the new album from Paramore. Slated for this coming February, the revered trio have returned with a soundtrack of our times, corroborated by their most recent single, ‘The News’. In a time where we can’t escape the misery of war, sickness and Kanye West becoming a Nazi, we can at least hear Hayley Williams empathise with our hopeless plight.
Williams describes ‘The News’ as “one of those songs that came together pretty quickly and felt exciting from the start.” She elaborates: “It feels like a happy medium between classic Paramore angst and bringing in some influences we’ve always had but never exploited. Watching Zac track drums for this one was one of my favorite memories from the studio. Lyrically, it probably explains itself. The 24-hr news cycle is just impossible to comprehend. And I feel a pang of guilt when I unplug to protect my headspace. The common reaction, or non-reaction, seems to be dissociation. Not one of us is innocent of that and who could blame us?”
Shared alongside a music video inspired by Paramore’s favourite horror movies, ‘The News’ is a little more to tide fans over until the sixth studio full-length from the band arrives in 2023. Previous and eponymous single ‘This Is Why’ launched the release cycle, which you can check out here. “It summarizes the plethora of ridiculous emotions, the rollercoaster of being alive in 2022, having survived even just the last 3 or 4 years,” Williams said of the single. “You’d think after a global pandemic of fucking biblical proportions and the impending doom of a dying planet, that humans would have found it deep within themselves to be kinder or more empathetic or something.” If we can’t solve our problems, we can at least sing about them together – This Is Why is out on February 10th via Atlantic Records.
