Paramore bandleader Hayley Williams has been up to a lot — from joining world-dominating pop star Billie Eilish on the stage at Coachella to recording the highly anticipated follow-up album to 2017’s After Laughter. But there’s more in the works, including this just-announced podcast called Everything Is Emo, a part of the BBC Sounds Back To Back series, that will dig into the history of the genre.
In a statement, she explained what motivated her to start this new project:
“Not long ago, people started calling me a ‘veteran’ of my scene and of the music industry. It sounds so funny to me because most of the time I still feel like a fan. The serious truth is I have, in fact, grown up in this scene for the last two decades. I guess that’s a pretty long time. I’m really excited to have the opportunity to publicly nerd out about bands and songs that make my favorite subgenre feel like home to me. And while it will be fun to take some trips down memory lane, I’m just as excited, if not more, to play music from new artists I’m discovering all the time.
Everything Is Emo is meant to feel like a conversation with other fans of the genre, young and (ahem) old. There’s going to be plenty of interaction, which I hope will feel somewhat reminiscent of the message boards and forums I used to frequent as a teenage scene kid.
More than anything, I hope music fans and artists alike will be psyched to hear a highly considered spectrum of ‘EMO’ in all its forms. And yeah, of course you’ll hear some Paramore.”
The first episode is out now.
Some artists covered here are Warner Music artists. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.