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Hayley williams is rocking on stage with a guitar and is starting to freak out because of her anti-anxiety medication. Mirtazapine, a pop-punk ode to the drug that “makes me eat” and “makes me sleepy”, quickly rouses the audience to a raucous chorus. His rapport with the crowd is so strong that it’s easy to forget this is Williams’ first performance in London since supporting Taylor Swift on The Eras Tour with her band Paramore in 2024, and his first European tour as a solo artist. “I remember most of you,” he says, cheering the crowd. He points to someone in the front row: “You’ve come on stage (at) Troubled Business.”
For years, Williams vowed never to pursue solo music. In fact, when he signed with Atlantic Records at the age of 14, he was forced to make music as part of a group. Now finally released from the contract he signed as a teenager, the 37-year-old’s third solo record, Ego Death at the Bachelorette Party, was a sad meditation on lost love and the loss of innocence. On stage, he seems to be healing those wounds with spiritual skills. A hard cover of Nina Simone’s Don’t Let Me Be Misundersod quietly leaves the room; the short version of Didn’t Cha Know by Erykah Badu starts off her hit song Good Ol’ Days.
Make no mistake, Williams is still the best on the title – glorious, explosive and unstoppable. The show’s highlights come when punk and R&B ideas merge: powerful vocals rush towards the end of the furious Kill Me, for example, or the relentless, megaphone-assisted scream of I’m in a Band! which disrupts the hidden movements of Ice in My OJ. Throughout this period it all had an anti-fascist theme, from the clear anti-fascist lyrics of True Believer, which denounced the white world in the US south, to Williams’s refusal to let his demons defeat him. “It’s been a lot of fun playing these songs and giving them a life that’s not… depressing,” he says at one point, before breaking out in a sarcasm. Hayley Williams gets the last laugh – with loud cheers from the crowd.
