Head Banging, Hard Truths, Pure Love: Welcome to the Hayley Williams Show

There was a challenge in the tone Hayley Williams took onstage at New York’s Forest Hills Stadium on Sept. 16. “You think you know me?” she asked on “Pure Love,” a glinting funk record from her debut solo album, Petals for Armor . “Wait til I open up to you.” It takes a level of intimacy, understanding, and time to really know someone. How do you distill such an undertaking in just under two hours? What’s too essential to be left out? On this tour, Williams works to find answers across 25 songs.

Early in the set, Williams raged through “Simmer” as lights pulsated to the beat of dark and sinister bass lines. They quickened in pace until the song reached an explosive peak and the words “The Hayley Williams Show” flashed onto the white curtains draped around the stage. During “Creepin,” there were giant eyes broadcast on the fabric, some with freakishly long lashes and others that multiplied to create an unsettled sense of surveillance. This sense of urgency never dissipates during the show. It isn’t always panicked, or even confrontational. Mostly, Williams just seems eager for the crowd to give themselves over to this connection for a little while.

Earlier this year, Williams spent three months performing in smaller rooms on the Hayley Williams at a Bachelorette Party Tour. She felt an insatiable hunger to spend her time “gorging on future memories while they’re hot and ready” and “practicing hyper-presence,” as she wrote online in May. Her album Ego Death at a Bachelorette Party had arrived just a few months before the run of shows began, and the songs were still new and finding their form in a live setting. They still felt like breakthroughs and fresh wounds.

Ego Death wasn’t the first time that Williams tore herself apart and pulled herself back together through song. But it afforded her the first opportunity to exorcise that emotional experience on a stage. Petals for Armor arrived a few weeks into pandemic lockdowns. There was a twisted irony in the internal confrontation required to make a record like that, mirroring the exhausting amount of time we were all made to spend with ourselves back then. The songs from that record are six years old now, but too new to the stage to be approached from a place of complete rest and recovery. They still bleed, too. Editor’s picks The 250 Greatest Albums of the 21st Century So Far The 100 Best TV Episodes of All Time The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time 100 Best Movies of the 21st Century

Williams kept the respective songs from each album close together, grouping them in three- and four-track clusters. The thunderous “Cinnamon” and “Dead Horse” with “Pure Love” and “Crystal Clear,” smoky selections brimming with devotion. In the studio version of “Crystal Clear,” there’s an airy space left after Williams sings, “We don’t know how this could end, let’s hope it won’t have to.” The live arrangement replaces the quiet with an overload of bass and percussion. It almost feels like a different song created from the perspective of knowing now what she didn’t then.