Review Score:

A

November 10 / 2025 –

When I was a kid, I played little league baseball. It was the first time I ever had to wear a protective cup to protect my groin, which required a particular pair of very awkward boxers. I didn’t really like it. I don’t know if it was something related to embarrassment or discomfort or laziness or some combination of the three. But regardless, I would frequently go without it. But I learned a valuable lesson that eventually changed my mind about it. I was at bat, something I dreaded. I was afraid of the ball more than I was afraid of striking out, so I would often position myself pretty far back from the plate, and even more often would strike out watching the ball fly by. But something compelled me to make an attempt on this fateful day. I swung a little early and a little high, and clipped the ball but only enough for it to bounce off the bottom of my bat and directly into me.

There’s a moment just after getting hit the groin where the pain hasn’t quite hit yet, but you know it’s going to. So as the umpire let me walk to first base (even though I’m not certain that’s really how that works, rule-wise), I winced all the way there, waiting for the wave of nausea to hit me. I managed to swallow the pain, but I was tagged out running to second on the following play.

This long-winded story about my wounded juvenile scrotum is perhaps a poor metaphor for Hayley William’s Ego Death at a Bachelor Party. And I realized that just a moment ago, but I’m not going to delete it. Too late. I’m in too deep.

But I digress. This album feels to me exactly how I felt while hobbling from first to second base. Wounded, embarrassed, pushing on because people are watching, and all the while knowing this is a problem of my own creation.

For the record, I love this. It took me a while to figure out what was going on with this album, which began as a collection of singles locked behind a password on Williams’ website. Once it was finally released as an album on streaming, I sat down and listened to it in full.

In recent years, audiences may have come to expect a certain level of vulnerability from Hayley’s work, both solo and with Paramore. To be fair, all of Paramore’s work is very emotionally charged. But that used to be fueled by a teen angst. And one that felt very genuine and relatable, which stood apart from some of the other similar acts of the day. 2017’s After Laughter saw Paramore leaning into an art-pop sound, and one that really rekindled my love for the band at the time. And both in Williams’ solo work and Paramore’s most recent album, this sound was built upon and expanded.

Ego Death is similar, but embraces a wider variety of sounds to great effect. I don’t know what to expect from Hayley Williams anymore, and I love that about her music.

Actually, scratch that. I do expect her lyricism to hit hard. And she succeeds handily in that area on this project. This album is over an hour in length, but it feels cohesive and well-paced. The highs and lows of the emotional rollercoaster are sequenced perfectly. “Dream Girl In Shibuya” is one of the harder hitting songs, a crushing track about trying to recapture the rush of a romance that started in secret.

It’s not uncommon for a Paramore album to dip into the occasional piano ballad. It’s almost a trope of the Paramore discography by now. And those songs are usually pretty solid. But they break up the flow of the project. On Ego Death, Williams disguises her hardest hitting songs. And thematically, they range quite wildly. There are romantic, longing, serenades. But among them are existential crises and anxiety-riddled refrains.

I previously failed to connect with the other solo work by “Ms. Paramore”. But this time around, it didn’t take more than a moment before I knew this was her best solo project yet. What it lacks in the singular focus and sound of her previous outings, it makes up for in spades in rich, evocative lyricism, and surprisingly catchy crash-outs.

Review Score:

A

Gubb wrote this review. You can’t get mad at Gubb.