How Paramore’s Album ‘Riot’ Became A Soundboard For Fans 15 Years Later

“Fuck it,” Hayley Williams says at the opening night of Paramore’s 2022 tour. On cue, the band, Taylor York and Zac Farro, launches into the opening notes of the 2007 breakthrough song “Misery Business.” The crowd roars as the band members, who are performing live together for the first time since 2018, play the only song they’d banned from their set list.

The controversial song, which calls another woman “once a whore, you’re nothing more,” was penned by Williams and her former bandmate Josh Farro. In 2018, Williams said the band would stop playing the song live after years of people referring to it as “anti-feminist,” and in 2020, she doubled down, saying she didn’t want it on playlists at all. This was met with both applause and chagrin from the band’s community.

Still, “Misery Business” and its accompanying angst-filled album “Riot!” are what made Paramore famous. It’s not often that a sophomore album puts any artist on the map, but after “Misery Business” reached the Top 100 songs, it cemented Paramore’s place in music history. As longtime fan Megan Mann puts it, “This wasn’t a sophomore slump; it was a triumph that catapulted them.”

Fellow emo kid Christina Orlando feels the same way, saying “Riot!” is a “no skips album” — high praise in the music world in which every single song on a stand-alone album is so good that you listen to it the whole way through without skipping any.

Eventually, they’d go on to tour with greats like No Doubt and Green Day, and win over a dozen awards for their work as a group. Even the famed Gen Z artist Billie Eilish was inspired by Williams growing up and invited her to sing with her at Coachella in early 2022. This was the first time Williams would sing “Misery Business” live since banning it, and she perhaps only agreed since Eilish omitted the word “whore” during their duet.

Paramore’s success seems easy, almost assured even, but when the band formed in 2004, having a frontwoman at the helm of a rock band was rare — and still is all these years later. That didn’t stop the orange-haired Williams from pursuing her dreams and inspiring entire generations of women to chase after the things they want most, even when the world tells them not to.

“The thing is that Hayley was [one of] the only women in an…