Hayley Williams Fires Up ‘Ego Death’ as Theater Tour Wraps Up in L.A.

Hayley Williams has some mixed feelings about both Los Angeles and Nashville, evidently. Kicking off a three-night stand at the Wiltern Wednesday night to conclude her “Hayley WIlliams at a Bachelorette Party” spring tour, she waxed enthusiastic about L.A. But not so enthusiastic that she wants to take up residence again.

“This is one of the venues in this country that I probably have the most memories in,” she told the crowd, referring to Paramore shows at the Wiltern in 2007, 2013 and 2022. ” “And it’s definitely the first time I’ve been back in a while that I’ve been really excited to come back. I tried to live here three fucking times, and it never stuck. The last time I tried to come live here, there was a fire… Now I’m just a tourist in L.A. But, oh my fucking God, do I love it here. And it’s really cool to be in the place where all these songs began. It is a very full-circle moment,” she said, seeming to spill the beans that the entirety of her recent 20-song “Ego Death at a Bachelorette Party” album — which she is playing in its entirety on this tour — was born in her experiences in L.A. prior to the beginning of last year.

And then: “Have you ever been to Nashville?” That question served as an introduction to the “Ego Death” album’s title song, which is very much about her once-and-future hometown. She seems to have serious issues with Music City, based on the mockery of that song, as well as the more serious and intense social criticism in “True Believer,” another number from the album. Yet she’d rather go back to her possibly god-forsaken hometown than live here, where she loves it. Go figure.

But dichotomies are serving Williams well, beyond whatever un-relocation issues she’s been dealing with. She is so far doing a solid job of navigating the balance between fronting one of the world’s most enduringly popular alt-rock bands, Paramore, and embarking on an ambitious solo career. Will the double-duty last? We’ll see. One reason for asking that question aloud is because, previously, it felt like Paramore might be a good place for her to get her rocks off as a kinetic rock ‘n’ roll performer while the solo records could become a good place to explore a contemplative side that doesn’t always mesh well with the needs of a band and its audience. But now, after her more intriguingly balanced “Ego Death” album, and especially after the tour that has followed, it is seeming like maybe Williams can have it all, or something close to it, without having to go back and forth across that fence.

What that foretells for keeping that split career ongoing into the future remains to be told. But her Wiltern show sure was satisfying for anyone who has taken a liking to different sides of the singer. Encompassing all 20 numbers from the latest album and not a single song that existed prior to it (rounded out to 22 with a quickie Nina Simone cover and a duet with Jay Som on their 2025 collab), the 95-minute set couldn’t have been less of a career retrospective. Yet it felt satisfyingly holistic anyway in representing the complementary sides of her music to date. Like she’d found a way to move to L.A. and still live in Nashville, or something like that.

Getting further into dualities, Williams addresses one possibile split in her personality in “Hard,” one the more intriguing songs from last fall’s new album, and one of the centerpieces of this touring set. It’s about how it’s easy to be hard (with apologies to “Hair”) when you’ve grown up as one of the boys, toughening yourself up to keep pace in as male-dominated a genre as rock. You feel for her as she sings about experiencing a desire to let down some of that tough-chick guard, as a romance brings up some unfamiliar feelings of tenderness. But watching her at the Wiltern, you could sense that there’s probably no world in which she goes soft on us altogether, or that we have to wonder which of her is the real Hayley, the way fans do with, say, the domesticated Gwen Stefani. When you see Williams move like Jagger, that swagger runs deep, innate and not at all self-conscious. You’d be hard-balanced to find a show with a better mixture of masculine and feminine energy than hers.

While the current tour of mid-sized theaters finds its very finite setlist in the “Ego Death” album, Williams has rearranged the order of songs so that it better satisfies some of the needs of a good rock-show trajectory. Not surprisingly, that meant moving up the record’s best guitar banger, “Mirtazapine,” to the opening slot. This pro-antidepressant song is the unofficial commercial jingle of the decade — who wouldn’t want to give it a try, with this buoyant an endorsement — so the only worry was whether it’d be all downhill from there.

And the resequencing meant “Parachute,” a slower but more emotionally cathartic rocker, could be pushed back to become the encore-closer. (This number has usually featured a guest vocalist on the tour; on opening night in L.A., it was Bethany Cosentino of Best Coast doing the harmonies.) That last number felt a lot more powerful live than it did buried in a middle slot on the record, That’s partly because of the power automatically afforded it by the climactic positioning, but also because of a more potent multi-guitar attack and some pointed she-means-it wailing. “I thought you were gonna catch me / I never stopped falling for you / Now I know better / Never let me leave home without a parachute,” she and her emotional support celebrity sang. Like some of the other post-breakup songs on the “Ego Death” album, it conveys more of a sense of disappointment than melodrama. Williams doesn’t really go for the grandest forms of anguish, the way so many young pop singers do. But even taking disillusionment in stride, as Williams often seems to, can feel like a gut punch when she and her band really get going with the stuff live.

Overall, there was a winning light-heartedness to much of Williams’ Wiltern set. That came right from the start, when she emerged in various shades of green — dark green knee-high socks, a light green minidress and, best of all, a bathing cap festooned with plastic green flowers, like Esther Williams going for a swim in the Emerald City. The cap came off after a few numbers, but her penchant for water imagery stuck around. So did her electric guitar leave after a few tunes, belying that the set was front-loaded with some of the album’s more rocking opening numbers, but there were still plenty of other guitars to go around in the band as she turned her attention to more of the fun strutting she does as Paramore’s paramount presence.

“I know we’ve been having a good time,” she told the audience a third of the way into the set, “but are you ready to cry?” They were, at least on the inside, as Williams sat down at a piano to sing “Blood Bros,” arguably the saddest song off “Ego Death at a Bachelorette Party.” This was Williams using her inside voice, as it were, to tenderly and tentatively inquire about a long-shot possibility of reconciliation well after a long-term relationship has dissipated. It’s a song that’s achingly vulnerable, by her standards. Even Jesus wept, probably. (Surely he was in the vicinity, anyway, because Williams does call him out nightly, in “True Believer.”)

“Negative Self Talk” involved some sort of unexplained stage ritual, as Williams poured out sand, or some other substance, in a semi-circle around her at the front of the stage, before stepping outside that layer of self-protection to sing the climax from the piano. “True Believer,” her look at religious and regional hypocrisy, showed the power of a solid key change happening between a verse and chorus again and again, but with more climactic oomph than on record, with Joey Mullen turning in a virtual drum solo to end the piece. Her cover of the Nina Simone/Animals classic “Please Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood” was an almost blink-and-you’ll-miss-it addendum to “True Believer” — just a verse and a chorus seated at the piano, ending with the singer standing in front of a footlight and using her hands to form horns, or antlers, on her shadow on the stage’s back curtain. I’m not sure what the exact message is in that playful projection, but maybe it’s a sarcastic affirmation that it’s some kind of devil that makes her take on evangelicalism and the South.

The lighting design for this tour is unique and obviously designed with small theaters in mind. That single footlight at Williams’ feet came up as primarily illumination again and again (really making those green socks pop), while at other times there was a monochromatic effect that puts the singer on roughly equal footing with the rest of her band. When she takes her band to bigger venues in the fall, it wouldn’t be surprising if the lighting changes for those settings, but it was a notably cool feature of this “Bachelorette Party” run.

Jack Antonoff was a guest on the first night of the run for the first encore number, “Good Ol’ Days,” although with the guitar parts in the song already pretty well-covered, his appearance on stage seemed more like a mutual friendly gesture than anything that was going to set off musical sparks. The sight of the two stars leaning their heads in together was a sweet one. But the quartet of featured artists (also including Rachel Brown, from opening act Water From Your Eyes, on “Discovery Channel”) was hardly a key component of the set, however much Williams said she wanted to highlight “all my music friends that live here.”

The tour is, after all, effectively a low-key declaration of independence. Independence from Paramore, for sure, even though she’s bringing over the touring musicians that helped them out opening on the Eras Tour to be her support here. And, also, thematically, independence from the need for romantic attachment — or at least the “Bachelorette” songs provide a window into wrestling with that eternal dilemma.

“Time for a love song,” she said, introducing “Whim,” the most blithe-spirited of her new songs. “Psych! Just kidding. It’s like 50%,” she clarified. “It’s a wish. We’re waiting for fulfillment, you know?” But later on, she got to the heart of the matter with “Love Me Different,” a faintly reggae-ish tune that refutes the idea that a new love necessarily has to be “better” than the obsessive old one, and explores “the greatest love of all,” Whitney-style. “Hey, Los Angeles, I’d like to do a breathing exercise with you,” she said as a tag, saying she knows L.A. is “into that woo-woo shit. The purpose of this is to make space for the love that you know that you deserve. OK? And, bitch, that might be from your damn self. Woo! Talking to me.”

So “positive self talk” is a thing after all. Not that Williams didn’t still accentuate the negative, when it came to certain subjects, like politics. “Motherfuck ICE!” she yelled, during “Ice in My OJ,” “and fuck this fascist administration too,” she added, with all the nuance that is called for in the moment. Feisty about current events, sensitive about mental health, and musically prone to prettiness and brazenness in about equal measure, Williams is bringing all of her best selves, two-decades-and-change into her career.

Could her show be any better when she returns in the fall, playing larger venues (including the sold-out Hollywood Bowl Oct. 5-6) and bringing in older material to supplement the new? Probably. But it didn’t seem like it at the Wiltern, where “Ego Death” felt like a full meal, just as Williams herself felt like the kind of full-service, natural-born rock star we need now more than ever.

Setlist for Hayley Williams at the Wiltern, Los Angeles, May 12, 2026:

Mirtazapine
Showbiz
Disappearing Man
Zissou
Ice in My OJ
Hard
Kill Me
Blood Bros
Ego Death at a Bachelorette Party
Past Lives (with Jay Som)
Whim
Glum
Negative Self Talk
True Believer
Brotherly Hate
Love Me Different
Dream Girl in Shibuya
Good Ol’ Days (with Jack Antonoff)
(encore)
Discovery Channel (with Rachel Brown)
I Won’t Quit on You
Parachute (with Bethany Cosentino)