Paramore Discography Ranking

Hayley Williams is the best frontman of any band created in the last 25 years! Don’t get me wrong, bands have kind of gone away the past few decades, so she doesn’t have many competitors, but it’s still impressive. No other lead singer in that timeframe has the combination of fronting their band in concert this well, the vocal ability that she possesses, and being as open about both the positives and negatives of her life as she does. Now, I know that this is about Paramore the band, but Hayley is not only the lead vocalist, but she’s also the only member that is credited on every album (Taylor York and Zac Farro are on the vast majority of the albums, but not all). Paramore is not just Hayley Williams, and her solo albums not being as good prove that the other members are important too, but the band wouldn’t exist without her. The other two current members are the aforementioned Taylor York on lead guitar and Zac Farro on drums. Jeremy Davis and Josh Farro were both important members in the band that have left. Zac also left at one point with Josh, his brother, but he ended up coming back. This is a good time to bring up that the history of Paramore is full of too much turmoil that I can handle in this post, so if you’re a huge Paramore fan, I won’t be talking about everything. I’ll try to cover some of the contexts of each album in the reviews, because the turmoil does inform the music, but this will be far from everything that goes on with the band. Just as an example, Jeremy left the band three separate times, but you don’t need to know all that to know that to enjoy Paramore. If you do want a more comprehensive dive into Paramore’s backstory, I would recommend the Bandsplain episode on the band. Not only is Bandsplain a good podcast, but Hayley Williams herself also recommended the podcast to new fans of the band.

I will say, when it came to ranking these albums, it might have been the hardest ranking I’ve done! It’s not that everything here is amazing, or terrible, it’s just all really good. While they do stylistically shift in the middle of their career, each album is still full of awesome, easy to listen to tracks. I could see any of these albums being somebody’s favorite, which is not something I can say about most of the bands. It’s actually a nice coincidence that I was doing this discography now, because it seems like Paramore is starting to slowly come back into the limelight. Their debut album just turned 20 a few days ago, and there was a deluxe version of the album that came out. Not only are they looking back at older music, but Hayley Williams just debuted a new song called “Mirtazapine” on a Nashville public radio station! And as of yesterday, she released a new album’s worth of songs on her website, so I would look for an official release of those soon! Zac Farro also released his debut solo album a couple weeks ago, which if you want to know my thoughts about that, check out the monthly roundup. So it seems like the members of Paramore are active, now it’s just waiting to see when the full group will be back. For now though, let’s look back at the albums that are out from Paramore!

6. Brand New Eyes (2009)

If you like Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours for all the drama that went on behind the scenes, this is probably your favorite Paramore album. There’s some of the drama that we’ll never know all the details of, but much of it seems to be around Hayley and Josh. They had been secretly dating for a couple years previously, before they broke up for reasons unknown. Josh also later cited that he wasn’t happy about Hayley getting all the attention of the band and her lyrics not aligning with his version of Christianity. Long story short, there was a lot of tension while recording this album, and it’s evident in these songs. Just listen to Hayley’s vocals on the first couple tracks, she sounds pissed. It’s also worth noting that they were still very young when this album came out. Hayley and Josh were 20 and 21 respectively, while Taylor and Zac were 19. They were growing in different directions from one another, and that discourse is felt through the music. Sonically though, this is the last Paramore album that really leans into the pop-punk sound, but you can hear that they’re ready to break out of the mold. All of my favorite tracks here are the ones that sound different, starting with the hit ballad, “The Only Exception”. Maybe it’s because I didn’t know this song that well before the project, but the lyrics here are wonderfully written, especially for someone that was 20 at the time. “Misguided Ghosts” is a full-on acoustic ballad that almost sounds like a Taylor Swift song, but again, Hayley’s lyrics help make this song special. I especially love the line, “Now I'm told that this is life, and pain is just a simple compromise, so we can get what we want out of it.” And of course, you can’t talk about this album without mentioning the closer, “All I Wanted”. It’s easily the best closing track in their discography, and while the guitar riff is fantastic for this ballad, it’s really due to Hayley’s incredible vocal performance! So while I don’t love this album all the way through, I really appreciate it in their discography as a bridge from older Paramore into newer Paramore.

5. All We Know Is Falling (2005)

They were teenagers making this album. When the album was released, Hayley was 16, Josh was 17, Zac just turned 15, and Jeremy was 20. Most of this album is actually about Jeremy leaving the band (for the first time) a few days into the recording process. Just look at the very first lines of the album, “We’ve tried so hard to understand, but we can’t. We held the world out in our hands and you ran away.” Most of the other songs on the album either refer to this departure or to Hayley’s view of her parents divorce. The easiest example to see this theme is the fantastic single, “Emergency”, where she compares relationships to being in a state of emergency. Sonically, this album is pop-punk through and through. Whatever comes to your head when you think of pop-punk, that’s what the album sounds like. There are some screamo vocals on the final track, “My Heart”, which shows an interesting way that Paramore could’ve gone. When we talk about gigantic, arena-sized anthems that Paramore releases later in their career, there’s not much of that on here. But what this album is, is ten awesome pop-punk tracks made by high-schoolers that show they have an insane amount of potential and space to grow!

4. After Laughter (2017)

While this album sounds happy, it’s apparent from the first words out of Hayley’s mouth that this album was not born out of a place of happiness. Hayley was going through a severe depression, so much that she ended up quitting the band for a second (leaving Taylor York as the only member for a moment). Again, let’s look at the very first lyrics of the album, “All that I want is to wake up fine. Tell me that I’m alright, that I ain’t gonna die”. These songs are very dark, lyrically, but it’s the complete opposite sonically. After Laughter is their full switch into synth-pop and new-wave. There’s not any of the heavy guitar licks that have dominated Paramore’s previous albums. The chords are no longer gigantic walls of punk-pop and teenage angst, and instead now sound like something more fit for the radio. Heck, just look at the cover art. The pink and yellow dominating the color palette helps the album immediately feel different than the previous four. Now, I personally go back and forth on how much I like this album. I do enjoy the album a lot, this just isn’t the type of music I usually listen to when I’m feeling the type of emotions that Hayley’s working through. It’s such a drastic dichotomy between the sound of the album and what the project is actually about that it throws me off. But still, the album is pretty awesome and a well-executed genre-change for the group!

3. Riot! (2007)

This is the start of what Paramore is now. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with the debut album, but this is where the trend of Paramore having a couple undeniable incredible tracks per album begins. While the whole project is awesome, the singles are what really stand out! “That’s What You Get” is a bit of a look into what the future of Paramore is after they stop making Warped Tour-ready pop-punk. It's a chorus heavy, lighter sounding song that could easily be played on pop radio stations. When it comes to “crushcrushcrush”, this is the heavier guitar riff that Paramore was more known for at this point. Honestly, it’s probably one of my favorite guitar riffs in their whole catalog, and it contrasts nicely with the chorus about staying inside! And of course, you can’t talk about this album without mentioning “Misery Business", the semi-controversial song that is one of the group’s most iconic tracks. While they do change a couple lyrics from the track when they play it live, as it could be interpreted as anti-feminist and slut shaming, Hayley’s vocals and songwriting ability are both incredible enough to overcome any of the shortcomings that she sees in the lyrics now. Now, this is also the most religious album in Paramore’s discography, with both “Hallelujah” and “Let the Flames Begin” being explicitly about God. While “Hallelujah” is enough of a jam to overcome the Christian music feeling, “Let the Flames Begin” makes me feel like I’m in church a bit too much. But besides the couple very overt religious themes, this album is a pretty awesome pop-punk classic!

2. This Is Why (2023)

This Paramore album is probably the one that’s most up my alley, sonically. You can tell they’ve matured past the youthful energy of their previous material, and are now starting to meticulously construct the songs instead of letting it come to them. They also just try different things that they never would’ve done before. For example, let’s look at “C’est Comme Ça”. Aside from the chorus being in French, it sounds like a lot of other newer Paramore tracks, but the verses consist of Hayley talking in a pitched down voice. There’s no singing at all in the verses, just a few spoken word lines. While you can clearly hear the Talking Heads influence in it, it’s such a unique thing to hear someone do in 2023, so I welcome it wholeheartedly. Lyrically, a lot of the album revolves around the pandemic, with the chorus of the title track literally being, “This is why I don’t leave the house”. But more often than not, it’s more about the effects of the pandemic, such as consuming so much negativity of the world in the song, “The News”, or criticizing the orange man currently in office with, “Big Man, Little Dignity”. Of course, there are still plenty of tracks that are just classic Paramore bops no matter the subject matter, such as “Crave” and “Running out of Time”. While I do hope that they continue to indulge their new wave and funkier side, I don’t know if they actually will, which is why I’m glad they at least did an album with some of these influences!

1. Paramore (2013)

This is a bit of an outlier in the Paramore discography, even without listening to it. Every Paramore album, besides this one, is between 35 and 42 minutes long and has between 10 and 12 tracks each. This self-titled project is more than an hour long and consists of 17 tracks. These songs also extend longer than most other Paramore tracks. Don’t get me wrong, besides the eight-minute closer, most of them aren’t that much longer, but you can feel the extended comfortability here compared to the blistering pace of the first few albums. Just look at the album’s biggest song, and the most popular song in their whole discography, “Ain’t It Fun”. The song itself is a fantastic pop track, but the song goes on for nearly five minutes because there’s an extended outro of Hayley doing a call and response of the post-chorus. Little moments like that add so much character to this album that isn’t in any other Paramore project. The same can be said for the last couple minutes of “Part II”, where Taylor gets to flex his guitar skills. Or the last minute of “Hate To See Your Heart Break”, which is just an extended instrumental with a string section. There are also three interludes that are just Hayley and a ukulele, and while they are just interludes, this is another addition of character that makes the album feel just that much better. The only drama about this album came after its release, where Jeremy left the band and ended up suing them, which likely ended up to the new album cover we have (the cover above is the new cover), but none of that comes into the actual album. At the end of the day, the songs on here are just great! Whether they’re pop-crossovers that have close to a billion streams or a soaring rock-ballad, the songs themselves are top notch!