Does anyone know if this is normal

What it means for Hayley Williams to drop 17 disparate singles in no particular order on a Monday

“So hit me, I can’t get soft,” Hayley Williams snarls provocatively in her new single “Hard.” I’ve been waking up with her voice in my head, with this or another one of these new songs on a loop behind my eyes, like they have been in my car.

“My ribs are metal cages to guard my heart,” it went this morning, as I felt the hand of consciousness press down on me. I’ve never been a morning person, really, and mornings are the worst lately. Well, except for the nights.

It’s been a rough summer.

When Hayley Williams released 17 songs without warning on Monday, July 28, 2025, they were in no particular order. In fact, they were scattered across the home page of her website, hayleywilliams.net, in a vignette designed to look like an early-2000s computer desktop. You could access this desktop view, littered with pixelated mp3 icons, by entering a 16-digit code, accessible through the purchase of one of her hair dyes. Or you could “ask a friend” for it, according to the password prompt.

They’re on streaming services now as 17 individual singles, and I’ve tentatively settled on my preferred track listing. “Hard” is first. There are multiple songs in the project that have the feel of a thesis statement, and there are moments when this one’s probably mine. It has the grit of a Paramore song, but flipped on its head: where once there were nimble drums and soaring guitars to guide Hayley’s voice, now there’s heavy, ringing tones and crunchy drum machines. It feels like chewing on sugar-coated gravel. It's a catharsis of thirty-something angst.

“Armor’s heavy, never suited me at all / but it’s the devil I know,” she admits before the final chorus. It’s how I feel this August: I wake up exhausted, I look for jobs, I say no to invitations and I do my schoolwork instead, I sweatily lug a bag of catered meals up to a pristine cool office on a fifth floor, I look for jobs, I stare at my phone. I have 82 spam voicemails about loan offers that don’t exist. I sift through them one by one. I deliver more meals. I sweat. I wait. I sleep. I wait.

So hit me, I dare the universe again, in Hayley’s words this time. I can’t afford anything, especially not being soft.

Paramore’s first album, All We Know Is Falling, turned 20 last month. At the time, in the shuffle of negotiations around it, the band—well, technically just Hayley—got locked into what’s known as a 360° record deal, the first of its kind. Panos Panay, CEO of online music platform Sonicbids, has said:

If you want to find out the future of 360° deals, look at Motown in the late 60s. ... They owned your likeness, your touring, publishing, record royalties, told you what to wear, told you how to walk ... Eventually all these artists left ... There’s two things we know about creativity: you can’t force it and you can’t really control it.

For the next 20 years, Paramore were bound by this shit deal with Atlantic, without control of multiple revenue streams that would have been theirs otherwise, stuck playing tours they may not have wanted to, perhaps even putting out music that wasn’t entirely on their own creative terms. Hayley toughed it out, fighting all twenty years for the integrity of her vision, of her bandmates’ vision, of the simple wish for Paramore to be a band, not just a Hayley. It was a long 20 years and now it’s over. What comes next?

Well, a bunch of singles released on a label called Post-Atlantic, for starters. The themes of the song collection, titled Ego, are deeply personal: on “Whim,” she mournfully repeats “I want to believe in love,” and on “Hard,” she admits that she’s “Always ready for the piano to fall / Always ready to be left out in the cold.” It’s a sharp detour from the mood of Paramore’s last album, This Is Why, which documented the three remaining band members’ loyalty to one another, including Hayley’s to her then-partner Taylor York. Well, I say that… That’s the thing, no one knows if they’re still together. Not since the singles dropped. On self-described “Paramore Twitter,” I’ve watched fans run themselves in circles trying to figure out exactly how breakup-y these songs really are—while trying to maintain a healthy level of restraint, because these are, after all, people we don’t really know. But it’s hard not to speculate a little, when she’s singing things like “You had me, why’d you let go?”

There’s a legend in Paramore fan lore: that Taylor York is really the one who’s continuously been in Paramore the longest. Between their 2013 self-titled album and their 2017 release After Laughter, Hayley supposedly called it quits, but Taylor (according to a quip in an interview) coaxed her back into it, reminding her of all the things she loved about what they’d built, about performing, about art. But all the hearsay aside, York has co-written Paramore songs since 2003, jamming with Zac and Hayley as the very first iteration of the band. What is Paramore without Taylor? These new songs have fans uneasily wondering.

But really, the question we should be asking is: who is Hayley without Paramore? (At least, without the Paramore that existed under the Atlantic Records deal?) It’s the current reality, no matter how ephemeral or permanent this solo era ends up being. She’s proven that she can write great songs on her own, but it’s not historically what any of us—herself included—ultimately wanted. “I’m in a band, I’m in a band, I’m in a band,” she yells on new track “Ice In My OJ,” mood inscrutable on a sentiment she used to take deadly seriously. Twenty-plus years into Paramore, is she being serious? Is it over? Does she want it to be? Is it even up to her?

If only the songs were in a particular order, fans speculated, we might be able to trace a narrative—to find answers on Paramore…only to subsequently realize that perhaps she meant the track list to be scrambled, for that very reason. Post-Atlantic. Two decades after All We Know Is Falling. Nothing or everything ahead.

Who are we, after all this time?

It’s a question, in regards to myself, that fills up my days and nights and brain. As much as I try not to, as Jemima Kirke says in the much-memed screenshot, “think about myself so much,” it’s hard to ignore the disorienting feeling that I’m in uncharted territory.

When I first started listening to Paramore, and shortly thereafter dubbed them my favorite band, I was 15. This August, I’m 33 and a half, divorced and jobless and waiting in the sweltering Austin heat for someone, something, anything, to show me who I am now.

—

My track list gets tricky at the end, and I’ll tell you why: on every other Paramore and Hayley solo release, the final track has been a BIG ONE. An obvious one. From the melodrama of “My Heart” on All We Know Is Falling to the sky-scraping shred of “Thick Skull” on This Is Why, it’s always a massive gut-punch bookend, sonically and narratively.

The closest I’ve gotten to selecting a worthy final track on my own playlist is “Glum.” It’s my favorite of the collection, and it feels, to me, the most like a conclusion. The song opens with a beat not unlike trip-hop, and Hayley’s voice, shrunk and distorted like a little alien, layered later in the verses with her own ethereal harmonies. On the chorus, she bursts in with her signature alto over four plain sorrowful chords: “Do you ever feel so alone / that you could implode / and no one would know?”

But it’s still not a resolution. How’s “Does anyone know if this is normal” for a takeaway? What does it mean for us, the unglamorous, the untalented, if multi-hyphenate Hayley Williams feels this way?

Like she says in the chorus, I wanna go back to wherever we’re from, whatever we’re from, and I used to look to Hayley as living proof that perhaps somehow I could. But no, she’s just like me now. “On my way to 37 years / I do not know if I’ll ever know / What in the living fuck I’m doing here / Does anyone know if this is normal?” I realize, with a sinking heart, that in the wake of all this career success, she feels as alone as I do. And neither she nor I know what to do about it.

Ego doesn’t have bookends. And even if I’m supposed to choose my own, I’ve found it impossible. There’s a story in the songs, but I can’t find the end. I’m starting to think Hayley can’t, either.

—

A few days after the singles got uploaded to streaming platforms, I checked Instagram and saw that Hayley had posted a story.

In it, she proposed that fans build their own track order of the 17 songs and tag her in them, and that she’d like to see how everybody else thought the compilation should go. There would be an Ego physical release at some point, she assured everyone, but she thought it would be fun to let the fans decide how it gets assembled.

“The truth is, I didn’t set out to make an album, I just needed to write, and I ended up with all these songs,” she says in the post, from the driver’s seat of her car that’s stuck in nasty Nashville traffic.

“And I have never known,” she continues, slowly and thoughtfully, “I’ve never really known what I think the full experience of all of it should be. But I kinda just wanna understand how you’re experiencing it.”

To think about my hero, one of the most listened-to artists in the world not only currently, but of all time, admitting that she’s never really felt connected to an album release. To see her feeling the freedom, for the first time ever, to redefine the artistic process, to explore, to experience curiosity in how her work is received. It felt like a kind of softness, a kind of openness I’d like to emulate. It felt like a way forward.

—

“Sing us a song,” goes the chorus of “My Heart,” the final track of All We Know Is Falling. “Sing us a song / and we’ll sing it back to you,” wrote Paramore twenty years ago. It feels full-circle, this new request for our interpretation of Ego. This time, she wants us to sing back to her. “This time,” she said on “My Heart,” and she said in not so many words on her Instagram story, “I will be listening.”

I feel stuck here, in this endless summer in this cruel city. I feel overwhelmed at the vast nothingness ahead of me: what am I going to do for work the rest of my life, with the world changing at the pace it is now? Am I still a writer? Am I the same girl who’d cry in her car to Paramore after school? I’m not sure, but Hayley’s songs are reminding me that there are ties that still bind—in music, in myself. Is Paramore still a band? Who is Hayley post-Atlantic? Who am I now? I’m not sure. But the one thing I am sure about, is that back and forth, Hayley and I, and all of us, we’ll figure it out. Even if it feels like starting over.

—

Here’s my version of Ego. Honestly, it’s still a work in progress.