Paramore Album Review [This Is Why]: Anxiety Series In Pop Funky Dance

Paramore (Instagram @paramore)

JAKARTA - This Is Why, Paramore's sixth album, released on February 10, 2023, is a place for post-punk psychedelic material to reflect on confusion because we are burdened by life and problems around - from the most common in us to the very far away - until finally despair emerged.

The first four songs on this album are like a series of anxiety, capturing the kind of feelings we all feel all the time. All through the punk stunning dance media inspired by Talking Heads.

In just four songs, Paramore overcomes anxiety carrying the brunt of global destruction (The News), contemporary discourse divisions (This Is Why), uncontrolled time loss (Running Out of Time), and frustrating journeys "to be better" (C'est Common Laughs) with a perfect connection.

Paramore has demonstrated the ability to diagnose collective emotions previously in which they did on album After Laughter like in Hard Times and Fake Happy pretty well.

However, This Is Why stands out far more. Taylor's York guitar punctures and cuts even sharper. Zac Farro's drum game is locked, pushing the song forward with impressive strength and precision.

And then there's Hayley Williams, equally captivated the good of her when she sings using the top of her lungs like in Thick Skull or talks better than Dry Cleaning's Florence Shaw in C'est Comme Laughs.

This Is Why, like After Laughter, suffers a little from its charge imbalance. The back of the album feels very different from the front, more personal and relational and close to the pop roots of the punk Paramore.

If you're a pop punk fan and think indie is boring, it's not an album for you. Let's hope Hayley et al don't turn their entire set into this album, as it will make their concert so boring.

In short, in this album, Paramore sounds like it's making music while dealing with bad things around. However, all the songs are well executed, and offer a glimpse of the way we all have to deal with universal and special things at the same time.