Hayley Williams Sells Out the Hollywood Bowl Without a Single Paramore Song

Hayley Williams sold out two nights at the Hollywood Bowl this week and performed for almost exactly two hours on Monday without playing a single Paramore song. Nobody cared, according to Variety's review of the Oct. 5 show. The 17,000-capacity house got Portishead's "Wandering Star," a surprise encore from Zedd, and 23 songs drawn almost entirely from her three solo albums.

The set leaned heaviest on 2025's "Ego Death at a Bachelorette Party" — 12 tracks — and 2020's "Petals for Armor," which contributed 10. Only one song, "Just a Lover," came from 2021's somber "Flowers for Vases/Descansos," performed in excerpts at the piano to open the show and reprised at the close of the main set.

What changed in one album?

Variety credits "Ego Death at a Bachelorette Party" as the turning point. Williams initially released the album in mysterious spurts, "like it was a bunch of between-project demos," before listeners realized it "added up to the game-changer project of her career." Five months ago she toured small theaters — including a May date at the Wiltern in Los Angeles — performing all 20 tracks of that record. The fall amphitheater run, by contrast, feels like "a decent summation of a long-building repertoire," the review says.

She also finally got the tour she never had: Williams planned to support "Petals for Armor" on the road before the pandemic canceled those plans. Between songs Monday, she half-jokingly called the whole tour a "Trojan horse" to finally play that material live.

What did the show actually look like?

The staging carried her ex-evangelical preoccupations into view. Williams wore a white mini dress adorned with six hand-drawn devil faces on the front and a larger sketched devil's head on the back, just above a cross tattooed on her upper thigh. At the end of her solo-piano cover of the Nina Simone/Animals classic "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood," she formed devil horns with her fingers, silhouetted large on the Bowl's screens.

Other set moments included:

• "Wandering Star," with Williams producing sounds over an old-school computer bank, shown in direct-overhead shots on the big screens, as the third song.
• "My Friend," during which a makeup artist applied glitter and paint around her eyes in extreme closeups.
• "Leave It Alone," introducing a female string quartet that reappeared throughout the set.
• "Dead Horse," the song understood to be about her former husband Chad Gilbert. Williams had removed it from three concerts following his death last month, apparently out of respect, but restored it for this run.

During the title track "Ego Death at a Bachelorette Party," footage of Nashville's Lower Broadway covered the stage and 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" in the song. "God bless Dolly Parton," she added.

How political did she get?

During "Ice in My OJ," Williams exclaimed "Fuck ICE!" and "Free Palestine," as she does nightly. The White House had officially responded to her earlier "Fuck ICE" commentary with a statement: "America is grateful all the time for our federal law enforcement officers who keep us safe. We suggest Ms. Williams to (sic) thank them for their service, not belittle their sacrifice." Williams replied on Instagram: "And may I suggest all Nazi bitches suck on my fat dick."

She introduced "True Believer," her reckoning with her Southern heritage, the same way she does each night: "The biggest threat to American democracy is Christian nationalism." Variety calls the number a broadside against hypocrisy she saw growing up in Tennessee, with "a very sad gospel song" buried inside it.

Is she bigger than Paramore now?

Variety poses the question without answering it definitively. The review argues that with her first two solo albums she was "trying to dance outside the edges of what that band would do," while now she takes her material "bigger and broader" without worrying about stepping on Paramore's toes. The band, the reviewer notes, could return "in a couple of years, or never, or some time in between."

The punk ethos extends to ticketing. Through the Face Value program, Williams kept tickets around $130 and difficult to scalp — on the day of the show, resale tickets remained available at face value.

The encore paired "Mirtazapine" and "Brotherly Hate" with the 2013 Zedd collaboration "Stay the Night," before the nightly closer "Parachute," which Variety reads as "a glorification of hard-earned self-sufficiency." With a second Bowl night still to come this week and a fall amphitheater run underway, the solo career has stopped looking like a side project.