Paramore singer and keyboardist Hayley Williams just released “Why We Ever,” another single set to appear on Williams’ debut solo album Petals For Armor, which is set to drop May 8th. The song will join “Over Yet” and “Roses/Lotus/Violet/Iris,” as well as the songs released as part of Petals For Armor I.

The song is a beautiful callback to the 1980’s, full of bouncy percussion, bass-slapping lines, and pad synths laying down the chords in the background, all accompanied by Williams’ velvety vocal delivery. The songs calls out for a lost love, as Williams sings in the chorus, “And now I / can’t seem to remember why / We ever / Felt we had to say goodbye”. The visuals appear to be filmed with a home video camera (just like er video for “Over Yet”), as Williams drives around in her car taking shots of the natural world around her. Halfway through the song, the tone shift dramatically to a much darker, melancholic sound, as Williams sings with just a piano accompaniment. The visuals reflect the tonal change in the song, as Williams films herself driving down a dimly lit road as the song ends.

“I was at the lowest point I’d been in some time. My sadness shows,” Williams wrote in the caption of an Instagram video showing her demoing the track. “Now I look back and credit this night as being the beginning of a new season of my life, where I hold myself accountable for learning to love better. I’ve let myself down a lot in love. This was the start of recognizing bad patterns and acknowledging that I’m ready to grow out of them.”

Williams has been in the process of releasing a plethora of solo songs as she begins to transition from a career with Paramore into a solo career, including “Cinnamon,” “Leave It Alone,” and most recently “My Friend“. All of the singles have been leading up to her Petals For Armor project which was supposed to be followed by a Petals For Armor summer tour, but with the coronavirus pandemic currently restricting mass gatherings, the status of the tour is up in the air. Williams recently posted a video of herself covering Phoebe Bridgers’ “Smoke Signals” as an effort to entertain her fans during this period of quarantine.

Photo Credit: Mehreen Rizvi