Paramore: ‘We don’t see our past as worth more than where we’ve got to go’ | Interview

There’s also the question of what expectations are directed at the band once it’s won over a new generation of listeners. Williams continues, “There are all these new fans who are nostalgic for something they haven’t experienced. It made us ask ourselves, you know, “What are we? Shall we try to offer something? Shall we try to remake this old thing? As we were writing, we kept calling it an old jacket. Like, “Are we going to put the old jacket back on and try to do the thing?” And it just never felt right to do it. It’s not the first time we’ve experienced that, because any time you have an album with any degree of success, I think there’s this external pressure that says, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” sort of thing. We never liked that. We always wanted to just release something new.”

However, it is the strength of their friendship that outweighs any anxiety. “We worked out most of our shit a long time before we made this album,” Williams says. “The only stipulations these days are that our relationships with each other come first, and that mental well-being comes before career.” Yorke is a self-confessed introvert who measures his thoughts carefully, and so they are often expressed eloquently: “Whenever start a recording, you feel like you’re staring at a mountain. You don’t even know if this mountain is a mirage or even scaleable. But we believed in it.” This is the reason is an effort of three. “This is the most collaborative record we’ve done from top to bottom,” Yorke believes. “We were all involved in every part of the process and we’ve never done this before.”

On the Paramore subreddit, a post claims that something every new Paramore fan should know is that “we owe everything to Taylor York.” Apart from Williams, he is the band’s most durable member – “the literal glue that holds Paramore together”. It was Yorke who contacted Faro after his departure and asked him if he would be their studio drummer After laughing, which led to a rekindling of their friendship and eventually led to Faro returning to the band permanently. After Williams quietly left Paramore for a short period of time due to her struggles with depression, she credited Yorke, her closest songwriting partner, as one of the reasons she’s still alive. He produced Williams’ first solo album, Petals for bumper in 2020, a return to softness and release from anger, and helped her adapt a love song her grandfather had written for her grandmother, a closing track they titled “Crystal Clear.” In a recent interview in The Guardianthey have confirmed that they are dating.