‘Rage is a quiet thing,’ sings Hayley Williams after a big exhale. As the track Simmer gently stretches into life, she continues: ‘You think that you’ve tamed it, but it’s just lying in wait.’ These are the introductory lines to the singer’s first solo record, Petals For Armor, and can be taken as an early indication for where things are headed. It’s a collection of songs that finds the vocalist bristling like never before. Not that Hayley is a stranger to some emotional ire. In the early successes of Paramore, the band that the 31-year-old has fronted since she was a Nashville teenager, she became a figurehead of the 2000s emo scene that specialised in pent-up angst. On 2017’s After Laughter, the band’s most recent release, a matured pop sound flush with ’80s ...
