The chances of Hayley Williams dropping a demo CD of her unreleased music on your doorstep in Nashville, Tennessee, isn’t likely – but it certainly isn’t impossible.
Amidst efforts to save public radio stations on Tuesday, following new US public broadcasting federal cuts, WNXP Nashville were gifted a CD from Hayley herself to air live. The disk read: “Thanks for keeping me company. Long Live Public Radio”. Little else was said in relation to future music – cryptic stuff.
The new track titled ‘Mirtazapine’ follows the Paramore multi-instrumentalist’s recent soulful collaboration with artist Moses Sumney and is the first solo work to follow Hayley’s 2021 self-recorded second album ‘FLOWERS FOR VASES / descansos‘. Paramore drummer Zac Farro also released his debut solo album ‘Operator’ just on Friday, seemingly all of Paramore have been busy since their Eras Tour run across Europe last summer.
An angsty shoegaze ode to antidepressants, ‘Mirtazapine’ sees Hayley using she/her pronouns to describe “a genie in a screw cap bottle to grant me temporary solace”. The song’s wailing guitar hook harks back to the punchy guitars featured in Paramore’s ‘You First’ and that of artists like Mannequin Pussy and Courtney Barnett. Unlike her past solo work, ‘Mirtazapine’ sees Hayley revisiting her rock roots, her vocals raw as she yells between guitar stabs, the lyrics of the song meanwhile emphasise a sort of plaster over broken glass temporary fix: the cracks could give way at any time or the pipes could burst akin to Paramore’s ‘Pressure’ music video setup.
Not entirely a stranger to the odd demo CD drop, in a lovingly chaotic turn of events Hayley herself drove to a fan’s house to deliver a candle and her song ‘My Limb’ in 2021, so it all seems fitting she’s debuting her newest work on CD format once again.
