Album Review: This Is Why by Paramore

Paramore have got us where they want us now. Despite releasing no new music since 2017's After Laughter, the pop punk veterans find themselves at that perfect cross-generational point in their careers, increasingly beloved by the Warped Tour nostalgics, as well as TikTokers who brought the band's 2007 smash "Misery Business" out of retirement with a clever Olivia Rodrigo mashup. The easy thing here for Hayley Williams and co.

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A worthy if mildly disappointing addition to Paramore's canon. If there's one thing I've found fascinating about the critical reaction to just about every Paramore record for the past decade (or more), it's the zeroed in focus on how the band has "matured". It's almost always billed as a stylistic leap, a sonic reinvention, or the band's new frontier in which they finally ditch their pop-punk roots and all of their high school drama, as if that hadn't already been done by 2013's Paramore. Thus, it came as little surprise when identical sentiments gushed from nearly every single This Is Why review.

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Paramore have rebuilt their house again – and they've settled in right away. Standing taller than ever, on 'This Is Why', they've taken the same raw materials that have informed their songwriting for ever and added some new building blocks from the things informing their life now, 20 years on from when they started out, and adapted the sound of Paramore to suit where they are now with grace. Paramore are no strangers to making a musical about-turn; in fact, they've trained their fans to expect it.

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