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Chris Willman
Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic
ChrisWillman See All
When do trimmings become the main course? Or, to pose it in employment terms: When does a side hustle became the real hustle? And can that just go down without a hitch?
These are just ways into trying to think about developments in the career of Hayley Williams, who easily sold out two shows this week at the Hollywood Bowl, something we wouldn’t necessarily have taken for granted for her as a solo artist even a couple of years ago. In the first of two nights there Monday, Williams performed for almost exactly two hours without doing a single Paramore song — and what’s remarkable is, nobody cared.
Well, maybe that’s an overstatement: Probably someone out there in the full house of 17,000 had read the promo material for the tour and figured the promise of material from her three solo albums “plus exciting surprises” at least left room for the possibility of a Paramore or tune or two. But the “exciting surprises” on Monday amounted to a Portishead cover and a surprise encore appearance by Zedd, as opposed to “That’s What You Get.” Which was fine. More than fine, really: Williams’ Bowl set made for one of the most satisfying rock shows you could see this year, regardless of the fact that the only misery business being transacted was the unusually sweltering October weather that had everyone present walking up in a sweat.
Speaking of boiling, this all boils down to: What a difference a single album can make. For Williams, that album was 2025’s “Ego Death at a Bachelorette Party,” which she originally dribbled out in mysterious spurts like it was a bunch of between-project demos before everyone gradually realized that it added up to the game-changer project of her career. Five months ago or so, she did a tour of small theaters (see Variety‘s review of her May L.A. show at the Wiltern) in which the setlist consisted primary of all 20 tracks from “Ego Death,” plus an excerpt of “Please Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood” as a bonus mission statement. For anyone who caught that mini-tour, which felt surprisingly closer to a full meal than a teaser, it’s no surprise that this current fall amphitheater run feels like a decent summation of a long-building repertoire, rather than the shorter sliver of her life’s work to date that she’s actually offering.
Hayley Williams at the Hollywood Bowl, Oct. 5, 2026 Zachary Gray Part of the pleasure Williams is clearly taking in this current outing is that she’s getting to tour behind two albums at once — not just “Ego Death,” which she’s now doing 12 tracks from, but a good 10 from “Petals for Armor,” the 2020 album that she’d planned to follow up wih a debut solo tour before the pandemic changed plans. Perhaps it shouldn’t be a huge shock that, in contrast, she only picked one selection from the album that came between these two, 2021’s “Flowers for Vases/Descansos,” an album so flagrantly somber it felt like a side project among side projects. But the one “Vases” song that did get performed, “Just a Lover,” got an interesting spot — or spots, since solemn excerpts from it were played by her at the piano to open the show and then be reprised at the close of the main set, perhaps as a reminder of how un-perky her music could be if she let more depressing thoughts take over. (One of the despondent lines from that song, “No more music for the masses,” was emblazoned on one of the shirts sold at the merch stand, proving that the singer maintains a fine-tuned sense of irony.)
Williams can be plenty downbeat, lyrically, at least, even when she’s keeping those other “Flowers for Vases” songs locked in the closet. And it was telling, in some way, that the one cover song she has added to this tour is Portishead’s “Wandering Star,” which is literally the farthest thing from sunny, with its grief-stricken verses and “The blackness of darkness forever” refrain — performed with Williams hovering over an old-school-looking computer bank to produce those sounds, as seen in a direct-overhead shot on the Bowl’s big screens. She did mean to take a bit to get the party started, as that descent into celestial bleakness was only the third song in the set. But then the cheerful “Hayley Williams Show” logo appeared on screen, as if we had just passed through an extended pre-credits sequence. “Simmer,” a “Petals” song that is one of her most emotional and vivid, followed, with its message that one way out from a traumatic relationship is to embrace a righteous rage.
Hayley Williams at the Hollywood Bowl, Oct. 5, 2026 Zachary Gray Williams took till the sixth song, “Ice in My OJ,” to finally broach the “Ego Death” album and some of its less soul-scouring material. (The song’s already ambiguous “I’m in a band!” chant takes on further layers, now that she’s out on the road with a pretty great assembly of musicians, that isn’t Paramore.) “Kill Me” quickly followed as one of her best current anthemic singalongs — not as nihilistic as it sounds, so much as just having some playful, emotionally exhausted fun twisting around Nietzsche’s overquoted words. “Hard” followed — her brutally honest look at the baggage around the feminine mystique, and the no-win situations that come with being a Woman in Rock. “My Friend” found her putting on a mask, literally, as a makeup person came out to affix glitter and paint around her eyes, as seen in extreme camera closeups, allowing her to look Mardi Gras-ready for the rest of the night, even if the actual party on stage had its emo ebbs and flows.
Hayley Williams with string quartet at the Hollywood Bowl, Oct. 5, 2026 Zachary Gray The poignant “Leave It Alone” saw the arrival of a female string quartet that periodically reappeared throughout the set — and also the intriguing use of a polyrhythm complex enough that you had to remind yourself it was your mind that was out of time, not the band itself. After this, Williams took time out between songs to celebrate the audience’s approval of all the “Petals for Amor” songs, like “Leave It Alone,” that had provided the majority of the set thus far, half-seriously remarking that the whole tour was a “Trojan horse” to get to finally play that material.
Among the “Petals for Armor” songs in the set that were performed without comment: “Dead Horse,” a song understood to be about her relationship with former husband Chad Gilbert. As fans had noted, she took it out of the set for three concerts following his death last month, apparently out of respect, but it’s back in, because history is history, and relational trauma transformed into a sing-along dance track is always a recipe for concert success.
Truth be told, as much cathartic fun as “Dead Horse” is — tempered by recent events or otherwise — there’s not a track on her more recent record that doesn’t beat it. And the second half of the show really soared as she uppped the “Ego Death at a Bachelorette Party” quotient, including the title track, which had footage of Nashville’s Lower Broadway logjams projected onto not just the stage but the Bowl’s entire proscenium. “Turns out he’s the least of our problems in Nashville,” she quipped, apparently referring to Morgan Wallen, the presumed “racist country singer” whose bar she visits in the tune, without expounding on who or what is even worse. “God bless Dolly Parton,” she added, bringing up a more universally beloved ambassador from her home state.
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