Paramore have released a new song, ‘The News’, which is taken from their forthcoming LP This Is Why. The track arrives with an accompanying video co-directed by Mike Kluge and Matthew DeLisi. Check it out below.
“‘The News’ is one of those songs that came together pretty quickly and felt exciting from the start,” Hayley Williams explained in a statement. “It feels like a happy medium between classic Paramore angst and bringing in some influences we’ve always had but never exploited. Watching Zac [Farro] track drums for this one was one of my favorite memories from the studio. Lyrically, it probably explains itself. The 24-hr news cycle is just impossible to comprehend. And I feel a pang of guilt when I unplug to protect my headspace. The common reaction, or non-reaction, seems to be dissociation. Not one of us is innocent of that and who could blame us?”
Discussing the track in an interview with Zane Lowe on Apple Music 1, Williams said:
Personally, I was like, “Okay. We’re not typically a political band,” and it’s not a solely political song or a solely political album. I understand that where we live, where we’re positioned is not always reality. And we got four years at home to be members of our own community, be face to face with our families again, and kind of plug into our local community, be citizens, vote in person, all those things, right? But that was our first real experience of that as adults. So who wants to hear a bunch of people whine about how difficult it is to live in 2022 or 2020 when maybe our lives don’t reflect the harshest of realities? But I think the other flip side to that is really wanting to do good and wanting to reflect the times as artists and wanting to be with it enough that we can use our platform. How can you ignore it? How can you not say anything?
It started with just the pandemic. Well, for us it started with the tornado in Nashville, but there was the tornado and then there was the global pandemic. There was George Floyd, there were all these uprisings, there were marches and protests that we went to. There was a bombing by a conspiracy theorist on Christmas Day in Nashville. It’s like we’re experiencing it from whatever vantage point we’re at, and there’s something to say about it. And I’m hoping, I’m praying and hoping that the perspective and the lyrics that we’re presenting is personal enough and as much with respect to everyone’s specific or potential vantage point that maybe other people can relate to it in some way that we haven’t even intended. And that’s the hopeful part of it.
This Is Why, the follow-up to 2017’s After Laughter, comes out February 10 via Atlantic. Paramore previously shared the album’s title track, which they performed on Fallon last month.
