Paramore - Brand New Eyes (2009)

I've had this album since 2009 and literally never looked at the album art close enough until now to see that the butterfly has pins through it. Gorey as fuck.

Ah, 2009. That's when my life started to take a nosedive, and coincidentally, so did the life of this band. You see, apparently the band (which has now recruited Taylor York as an official member, playing rhythm guitar) was gonna break up before this album was made, and a lot of the lyrics deal with it or are even targeted towards the other members of the band ("Ignorance" and "Playing God" specifically), and spoiler alert: The Farro brothers (Josh and Zac Farro, guitarist and drummer, respectively) left the band just a year later, which proved as the icing on the cake that was the shit-show of a year for Paramore because earlier on in the year, Hayley Williams accidentally tweeted a nude picture of herself, and no matter how quickly you delete that shit, someone's saved it and your tits, ass, and/or smelly little giblets are going more viral than Barack Obama saying "Thanks Obama" in a Buzzfeed video. Oh hey, there's something interesting in itself: BARACK OBAMA WAS OUR FUCKING PRESIDENT! Weren't those the good ol' days? Fuck, man, I am not excited for the next four years.

This time around, the boys and girl are back with an overall poppier album. Look, I'm not saying that "Riot!" was especially punk or whatever, but the songwriting overall had a rougher edge than most of the material on this album. You can whine and cry that "PARAMORE WAS ALWAYS POPPY" but can you see a song like "Where The Lines Overlap" appearing on that album? That isn't even getting into the radical departures that are "The Only Exception" and "Misguided Ghosts" either, ya fuck. The songs on here are generally really catchy, and Hayley Willams' vocals are just as strong, gorgeous, and powerful as ever (just listen to "All I Wanted", holy fuck) but the songs still occasionally take a bit of a bruise from the fact that they're poppier than before, kinda making some of the songs sound more like a backing band for Hayley Williams' solo career. Still, there's plenty of great tunes to be found on this album if you're a Paramore fan, it just probably won't hit you as hard as "Riot!" did, but this is the album you have to say was "the last good Paramore album" due to the Farro brothers exiting, so be sure to fellate the ever-living fuck out of it.

8/10
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Feel free to check out the song previews/buy this album using my Amazon Associate link!