{"id":73031,"date":"2026-09-17T19:49:35","date_gmt":"2026-09-17T19:49:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/musicianvoice.com\/index.php\/2026\/09\/17\/hayley-williams-brings-the-hayley-williams-show-to-forest-hills-stadium\/"},"modified":"2026-09-17T19:49:35","modified_gmt":"2026-09-17T19:49:35","slug":"hayley-williams-brings-the-hayley-williams-show-to-forest-hills-stadium","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/musicianvoice.com\/index.php\/2026\/09\/17\/hayley-williams-brings-the-hayley-williams-show-to-forest-hills-stadium\/","title":{"rendered":"Hayley Williams Brings ‘The Hayley Williams Show’ to Forest Hills Stadium"},"content":{"rendered":"


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\n\tThere was a challenge in the tone Hayley Williams<\/a> took onstage at New York\u2019s Forest Hills Stadium on Sept. 16. \u201cYou think you know me?\u201d she asked on \u201cPure Love,\u201d a glinting funk record from her debut solo album, Petals for Armor<\/em>. \u201cWait til I open up to you.\u201d It takes a level of intimacy, understanding, and time to really know someone. How do you distill such an undertaking in just under two hours? What\u2019s too essential to be left out?\u00a0<\/strong>On this tour, Williams works to find answers across 25 songs.<\/p>\n

\n\tEarly in the set, Williams raged through \u201cSimmer\u201d as lights pulsated to the beat of dark and sinister bass lines. They quickened in pace until the song reached an explosive peak and the words \u201cThe Hayley Williams Show\u201d flashed onto the white curtains draped around the stage. During \u201cCreepin,\u201d there were giant eyes broadcast on the fabric, some with freakishly long lashes and others that multiplied to create an unsettled sense of surveillance. This sense of urgency never dissipates during the show. It isn\u2019t always panicked, or even confrontational. Mostly, Williams just seems eager for the crowd to give themselves over to this connection for a little while.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tEarlier this year, Williams spent three months performing in smaller rooms on the Hayley Williams at a Bachelorette Party Tour. She felt an insatiable hunger to spend her time \u201cgorging on future memories while they\u2019re hot and ready\u201d and \u201cpracticing hyper-presence,\u201d as she wrote online in May. Her album Ego Death at a Bachelorette Party<\/a> <\/em>had arrived just a few months before the run of shows began, and the songs were still new and finding their form in a live setting. They still felt like breakthroughs and fresh wounds.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tEgo Death<\/em> wasn\u2019t the first time that Williams tore herself apart and pulled herself back together through song. But it afforded her the first opportunity to exorcise that emotional experience on a stage. Petals for Armor<\/em> arrived a few weeks into pandemic lockdowns. There was a twisted irony in the internal confrontation required to make a record like that, mirroring the exhausting amount of time we were all made to spend with ourselves back then. The songs from that record are six years old now, but too new to the stage to be approached from a place of complete rest and recovery. They still bleed, too.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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\t\tEditor\u2019s picks<\/p>\n<\/h2>\n<\/section>\n

\n\tWilliams kept the respective songs from each album close together, grouping them in three- and four-track clusters. The thunderous \u201cCinnamon\u201d and \u201cDead Horse\u201d with \u201cPure Love\u201d and \u201cCrystal Clear,\u201d smoky selections brimming with devotion. In the studio version of \u201cCrystal Clear,\u201d there\u2019s an airy space left after Williams sings, \u201cWe don\u2019t know how this could end, let\u2019s hope it won\u2019t have to.\u201d The live arrangement replaces the quiet with an overload of bass and percussion. It almost feels like a different song created from the perspective of knowing now what she didn\u2019t then. Her findings are what informed so much of Ego Death<\/em>, like the subsequent run of \u201cGlum\u201d and \u201cDisappearing Man\u201d into \u201cDream Girl in Shibuya\u201d and \u201cGood Ol\u2019 Days.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tThere\u2019s only one song on the set list from Flowers for Vases \/ Descansos<\/em>, the album Williams recorded at home in Nashville in 2020. \u201cJust a Lover\u201d opens and closes the pre-encore portion of the set. The first go around, Williams is alone onstage at her piano. \u201cLove has turned me into many others, now I guess I\u2019m just\/Just a lover,\u201d she sings. She doesn\u2019t reach the end of the song. Instead, she welcomes her six-piece band to the stage, most of whose members toured with Paramore during their This Is Why <\/em>run. When she returns to \u201cJust a Lover\u201d more than an hour later, the space is even more crowded with the addition of the True Believer Quartet for the first time on the tour.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe four-piece string ensemble previously joined Williams for a chilling performance<\/a> of the Ego Death <\/em>deep cut \u201cTrue Believer\u201d on The Tonight Show <\/em>last year. On tour, they recreated that rendition sans gospel choir, but complete with an interpolation of Billie Holiday\u2019s \u201cStrange Fruit.\u201d Forest Hills fell silent during the song, with the exception of an astonished \u201cdamn\u201d here and there. The context of the record, about the ghosts left in the wake of American sins, is gripping enough, but Williams\u2019 voice cut through with staggering precision. For an artist who has been refining their vocal instrument for years now, it\u2019s hair-raising to watch her learn new ways to wield it.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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\t\tRelated Content<\/p>\n<\/h2>\n<\/section>\n

\n\tWilliams combined \u201cTrue Believer\u201d with an abridged cover of Nina Simone\u2019s \u201cDon\u2019t Let Me Be Misunderstood,\u201d a song that pleads for the goodness of a soul to still be visible through the clouds of worry or anger. There\u2019s more than enough anger to go around, but most of it is built on the foundation of hope that any attempts to find the right words don\u2019t fall on deaf ears. This is one of the show\u2019s most important moments, largely because it takes the foundation Williams established with her own revelatory writing and builds on it with music that has shaped her, or taught her something about herself, in the same way her music has for the audience spread out in front of her.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tJust before the show began, Williams loaded up her pre-show playlist with six songs that speak to this musical conversation. <\/strong>The run started with Macklemore\u2019s \u201cCan\u2019t Hold Us\u201d and closed with \u201cThrift Shop,\u201d two songs the rapper performed during his opening set on Ed Sheeran\u2019s tour before being removed<\/a> for voicing his support for Palestinians on stage. In between, Forest Hills filled with songs from Lukas Graham, Finneas, Aaron Rowe, and Boega, the supporting acts who withdrew from Sheeran\u2019s tour in solidarity.\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n

\n\tSome might have heard Williams scream \u201cFuck ICE\u201d and \u201cFree Palestine\u201d into the mic during \u201cIce in My OJ\u201d earlier in the set and assumed it was a response to this week\u2019s headlines. But the chants have been a staple in her performances since the Ego Death <\/em>tour began earlier this year, just like her pre-\u201dTrue Believer\u201d declaration that \u201cthe greatest threat to American democracy is Christian nationalism.\u201d At a time when one of the biggest acts in music is arguing that his shows are not a political forum,<\/a> but instead a place of safety and sanctuary, the resounding cheers that ring out in response to statements like these are a transparent reminder that they can, in fact, be the same thing.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tWhen Williams dedicates \u201cEgo Death at a Bachelorette Party\u201d to Nashville, it\u2019s because she recognizes how this dichotomy haunts the streets there. Her love for the city is inseparable from the forces \u2014 whether racist country singers or tourists and displacement \u2014 responsible for dismantling and restructuring everything in the memories that keep her tethered there. There\u2019s a version of this happening in every city she performs in. It waits just outside the gates of each venue. It\u2019s part of why these audiences need these shows as much as they do.<\/p>\n

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\t\tTrending Stories<\/p>\n<\/h2>\n<\/section>\n

\n\t\u201cThank you for leaving your house and getting together with a bunch of strangers to scream, and sweat, and dance,\u201d Williams said towards the end of the set. \u201cI hope we always fight for this sort of thing. It should be a lot more available and readily accessible to you. It should not be so hard to go to live concerts. I\u2019ll see you next time. Until then, please take care of you. Take care of each other \u2014 and for fuck\u2019s sake, let\u2019s vote in November.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tWilliams pressed against the confines of knowing herself and being known in this show. She sang about overcoming an instinct to suppress femininity on \u201cHard,\u201d then moments later had her face painted in gold glitter in the middle of \u201cMy Friend.\u201d The crowd leaned in, too, illuminating the open-air venue with flashlights on an extra cloudy night in a place where it\u2019s already almost impossible to see stars, even when the skies are clear. It\u2019s a connection build on head banging, hard truths, and pure love. It\u2019s the Hayley Williams Show.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n


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