This Is Why

THIS IS WHY: POST-PUNK PIVOT, FULLY EARNED

Paramore’s This Is Why (Atlantic Records, February 10, 2023) is the Nashville trio’s sixth studio album — a lean, politically alert post-punk record that reframes the band’s entire catalog. Six years after After Laughter traded eyeliner for neon, Hayley Williams, Taylor York, and Zac Farro returned with ten songs built on angular guitar countermelodies, sidelined chord stabs, and Williams’ most considered vocal performances to date. The result is a band that has, against all genre logic, grown more interesting with age — and proved it at the commercial level too.

Production Architecture: Grooves With Teeth

The album had only one producer: Carlos de la Garza, who assumed the role as sole producer for the project.
That consolidation matters.
Prior to This Is Why, de la Garza had been involved in the recording process of Paramore’s previous two albums as an engineer, while Justin Meldal-Johnsen had handled production alongside Taylor York.
Elevating him to the producer chair outright signals a deliberate continuity of sonic DNA — and gives the album a cohesion that previous multi-producer efforts sometimes lacked.

Taylor York contributed guitar, keyboards, programming, vibraphone, and glockenspiel; Zac Farro matched him on drums, percussion, keyboards, programming, vibraphone, and glockenspiel; and the session also featured Brian Robert Jones on bass guitar and Henry Solomon on clarinet, bass clarinet, flute, and alto flute.
That flute and clarinet presence is not ornamentation — on “Thick Skull” and “Big Man, Little Dignity,” Solomon’s woodwind lines function as countermelodic agents, threading through York’s staccato guitar work at a timbre that sits just below Williams’ register, creating a kind of harmonic chiaroscuro that the band had never used before.

According to Alexis Petridis of The Guardian, the album “stirs 00s alt-rock into the mix: the band have mentioned Bloc Party and Foals as influences.”
That lineage is audible but not subservient. The opening title track operates in clipped, syncopated riff language clearly adjacent to Bloc Party’s early catalog, but York’s guitar voicings avoid the Kele-isms; he favors fifths and suspended fourths over power chords, which keeps the harmonic palette open even when the rhythmic profile is tightly wound. Farro’s snare sits high in the mix and has genuine crack — no sample-replacing, no excessive parallel processing. It sounds like someone actually hitting something.
Williams described the sonic direction as moving toward “electro clash and stuff that had a lot of groove,” with heavy influence from Bloc Party and “loud, ‘Wall of Sound’ emo bands that were happening in the early 2000s.”

Ims Taylor of Clash stated that “Paramore opt for simple, striking, and forceful on This Is Why, keeping in that New Wave tradition of punchy phrases iterated and reiterated, through vivid guitar countermelodies, offbeat punctuation and pointed lyrical looping.”
That observation is accurate at the production level: songs like “Running Out of Time” use a tight call-and-response between Williams’ vocal phrasing and York’s rhythm guitar that is closer to XTC’s structural thinking than to anything in the pop-punk playbook. For readers interested in another band navigating tonal shifts with care, Sam Fender’s People Watching offers comparable attention to guitar arrangement within an indie-rock framework.

Songwriting and Vocal Performance: Controlled Fury

All ten tracks are written by Hayley Williams, Taylor York, and Zac Farro
— a credit that has been true since the current three-piece stabilized, and which carries specific weight here. This is not a frontperson’s album with two sidemen. York and Farro’s compositional fingerprints are readable in the harmonic movement: the modulation into “Figure 8’s” pre-chorus is not something a pure pop writer engineers, and Farro’s structural choices on the kit in “You First” — where the song deliberately withholds a full-kit drop for an unusually long time — require a drummer who is also thinking as a songwriter.

Despite being the last track written for the album, “This Is Why” serves as the album’s opening thesis, with Williams expressing discontent at people’s inability to make or accept a nuanced take — but instead of allowing herself to be bothered by a perceived lack of empathy from others, she drops out of society altogether, hence the song’s line, “this is why I don’t leave the house.”
That’s a lyric that lands because of its specificity and its exhaustion rather than its grandeur. Williams has consistently been a writer who earns emotional authority through observed detail rather than melodic bombast, and This Is Why gives that tendency more room than any prior Paramore record.

‘”Big Man, Little Dignity” may be one of the most understated things Paramore has ever done, but beneath its breezy production lies a biting wit — Williams berates the subject of the track with subtlety, landing the insults “in a manner so reserved, you need to rewind to make sure you catch each line.”
The verse melody sits low in Williams’ range, almost spoken at points, which makes the chorus — when it arrives and rises — feel earned rather than engineered. Her control of register here is notable: she spends much of the record resisting the upper-belting instinct that defined the Riot! era, preferring a mid-register intensity that suits the post-punk dryness of the production.

The group traded the sadness behind their rose-colored glasses for anger — and for what feels like the first time, political discontent.

Williams stated in a Billboard cover story: “Everything is political, and it’s either politicized to a degree that maybe isn’t fair or it just inherently is political. Even if I tried to not say one word about anything political, I think it was just in the DNA.”
The album’s political register is not sloganeering. It is the background radiation of civic disillusionment turned into sonic texture — and Williams is disciplined enough to let the music carry the argument rather than spell it out.

Geographic and Cultural Context: Where the Map Gets Interesting

The album debuted at number two on the Billboard 200 with 64,000 album-equivalent units in its first week, 47,000 of which were pure album sales.
Album sales of that magnitude in a streaming-dominant market signal a specific fan demography: one willing to purchase physical or digital albums, not merely stream. That’s a catalog-building audience rather than a trending-song audience, which explains the sustained scrobble count two-plus years post-release.

The album hit number one on Billboard’s Top Alternative Albums, Top Rock Albums, and Top Album Sales charts.
The US market’s 185,595 Last.fm listeners — nearly three times the next closest country — confirms American alternative radio as the album’s primary vehicle of discovery.
After more than 15 years of appearing on the Billboard rock radio charts, Paramore hit number one for the first time when “This Is Why” lifted to the top of the Alternative Airplay list.
That airplay milestone, arriving a decade and a half into their career, is a statistic that resists easy narrative. It is not a comeback story in the traditional sense; Paramore never disappeared commercially. It is more accurately a refinement story — a band that got better at the precise craft required to dominate its target format.

Brazil’s 68,779 listeners place it decisively ahead of Canada (18,900) and Australia (15,653), which is geographically counterintuitive until you consider that Brazilian alternative rock listeners are historically receptive to post-punk-adjacent imports — the lineage running from early Interpol through Arctic Monkeys through Paramore’s own catalog has deep Brazilian catalog longevity. The UK’s 39,055 listeners, in a market where
Paramore claimed two UK number one albums
over their career, reflects a durable institutional relationship between the band and British alternative radio. Germany (6,209), Netherlands (5,824), and Poland (4,913) represent a coherent Western and Central European bloc that typically correlates with festival circuit presence — Paramore’s 2023 touring confirmed those territories remain active live markets.

Wesley McLean of Exclaim considered the album to be “deeply rooted in post-punk and art punk traditions.”
That critical consensus — audible in how the album was received across British, Australian, and North American press simultaneously — explains the cultural breadth of the geographic spread. Post-punk’s transatlantic critical esteem functions as a kind of passport: it gave This Is Why credibility currency in markets that might otherwise have categorized Paramore as too American-commercial for sustained independent-taste attention.

Critical Assessment: What Holds and What Doesn’t

The album holds a score of 85 out of 100 on Metacritic, based on 20 critics’ reviews, indicating “universal acclaim.”
That consensus is broadly deserved, but it is not without caveats worth spelling out.
Arielle Gordon of Pitchfork wrote that Paramore “reach for the propulsive sounds of post-punk” on the album, but found it “front-loaded with lyrical missteps and ironies,” and characterized the anger displayed as “too lazy and too late.”
That is not a frivolous critique. The album’s sequencing does front its most assertive material — the opening trio of “This Is Why,” “The News,” and “Running Out of Time” establishes the record’s register so emphatically that the back half has to work harder to justify itself. “C’est Comme Ça” (*That’s How It Is*), as the third single, drew the most polarized listener response precisely because it asks you to sit with a more repetitive structure when the album has already shown it can do more than that.

Chris Thiessen of Under the Radar noted that the album “suffers slightly from front-loading imbalance” but still felt it was “well executed and offers a glimpse into the ways we’ve all had to deal with the universal and the particular simultaneously in these last few years.”
That front-loading concern is real, and it is the album’s primary structural weakness. A record that runs 36 minutes should be able to sustain its argument all the way through — and This Is Why very nearly does, with “Liar” and “Thick Skull” recovering momentum in the final third. But “C’est Comme Ça” sitting at track four creates a mid-sequence plateau that attentive listeners will notice.

Writing for AllMusic, Matt Collar wrote that the album “pulls the artistic and emotional threads of their career into a cohesive, ardent whole.”
That is more accurate as a description of what the album achieves at the career-arc level. Heard alongside After Laughter‘s synthetic brightness and Brand New Eyes‘ post-hardcore directness, This Is Why does function as a kind of synthesis — not a retreat to origins, not a continuation of its predecessor, but a third position that absorbs both and arrives somewhere new.
Meredith Jenks and Christine Werthman of Billboard described the album as “a tight, post-punk juggernaut that zeroes in on pandemic-fueled anxieties.”

This is the first album since 2017’s After Laughter, and the second recorded by the consistent lineup of Hayley Williams, Taylor York, and Zac Farro — marking the first time the band’s lineup has been stable between two consecutive albums.
That stability is audible. There is a locked-in quality to the trio’s ensemble playing that comes from musicians who know each other’s tendencies well enough to subvert them intentionally. Farro’s polyrhythmic fills on “The News” arrive exactly where you think they won’t; York’s guitar drops out in the chorus of “You First” just as a lesser arrangement would double down. These are choices that require both musical intelligence and mutual trust. For a reference point in how guitar-led post-punk record-making can sustain this level of craft, Weezer’s SZNZ: Spring is an interesting adjacent study in a legacy band using format and structural constraint productively.

The album’s Grammy sweep — Best Rock Album and Best Alternative Music Performance for the title track at the 66th Annual Grammy Awards — made Paramore the first female-fronted rock band to win Best Rock Album.
Whether that particular award has ever been a reliable measure of quality is a separate conversation. What it does confirm is institutional recognition for a record that earned it through craft rather than nostalgia, and that distinction matters when evaluating a band twenty years into its existence.

Frequently Asked Questions

Where can I stream or purchase This Is Why by Paramore?

This Is Why is available on all major streaming platforms, including Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, and Tidal, as well as for digital purchase on platforms such as iTunes and Bandcamp. Physical editions — standard CD, and multiple limited-edition vinyl variants — were released simultaneously with the digital version on February 10, 2023. You can find the album page and streaming links at getmusic.com.tr/album/this-is-why/.

How was This Is Why received critically and commercially?

The album received a Metacritic score of 85, indicating “universal acclaim” based on 20 critic reviews, alongside a user score of 9.1.

It debuted at number two on the Billboard 200 with 64,000 album-equivalent units in its first week.

It also reached number one on Billboard’s Top Alternative Albums, Top Rock Albums, and Top Album Sales charts.

At the 66th Annual Grammy Awards, the album won Best Rock Album and the title track won Best Alternative Music Performance
— the most decorated single-album award cycle in Paramore’s career.

Which tracks stand out most on This Is Why?

The title track “This Is Why” is the album’s sharpest thesis statement — brisk, rhythmically taut, Williams at her most sardonic. “The News” deploys a rolling, almost hypnotic riff structure over which she processes media fatigue with precision. “Running Out of Time” is structurally the most surprising: it unfolds in a near-conversational vocal register before its chorus opens up unexpectedly. “Thick Skull” in the back half and “Liar” both demonstrate that the album has emotional range beyond its post-punk front-loading, and “Big Man, Little Dignity” rewards close listening for its dry, controlled wit.

What albums are similar to This Is Why, and where can I find them?

Listeners drawn to This Is Why‘s post-punk sensibility and guitar-forward arrangements would find productive company in Sam Fender’s People Watching — similarly guitar-literate, politically aware, and attentive to production detail. For a band negotiating legacy and creative evolution in a compressed format, Weezer’s SZNZ: Spring is instructive. Both are cataloged at Get Music for full context.