Hayley Williams has a voice built to radiate across a stadium. For a while, that's what she was doing.

Paramore's final leg of touring their 2023 album This Is Why was as support for Taylor Swift on the record shattering Eras tour. They opened the entire European leg, as well as the tour's very first weekend in Glendale, AZ. At that point, though, it was no longer about This Is Why. They would play the hits to a crowd of 70,000 that knew them word for word, and throw in a deep cut or two every set for the real heads.

Now, Williams finds herself comfortably nestled in indie spaces after a completed Atlantic contract and 20 years of being pop-punk royalty. On this past Monday night, I had the chance to see her at Franklin Music Hall, a venue with a 2,700 capacity.

This is Williams’ first ever solo tour, after the tour meant to support her debut solo outing Petals for Armor was canceled due to COVID. Those songs were left off the setlist to make room for her behemoth 2025 album Ego Death At A Bachelorette Party, which she played the entirety of (as well as a stunning partial cover of Nina Simone's "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood").

The last time I'd gone to a show at that venue was to see ascendant indie rocker MJ Lenderman, who coincidentally also had a project involving Nate Amos in the opening slot. Williams' opener, Brooklyn art rock duo Water From Your Eyes, exist in a broader musical universe of today's buzziest indie projects, as drawn out below.

Bassist Al Nardo and drummer Bailey Wollowitz are a duo of their own, releasing freaky, ambitious indie pop under the name fantasy of a broken heart. They're touring musicians for both Water From Your Eyes and This Is Lorelei, the Nate Amos-fronted indie rock project that opened for Lenderman last year. That project crossed paths with Williams herself just a few weeks ago when her new project Power Snatch covered "Perfect Hand" for the super-deluxe edition of This Is Lorelai's breakout record Box For Buddy, Box For Star.

Williams first met Water From Your Eyes vocalist Rachel Brown when being interviewed by them for Stereogum, which quickly sparked mutual admiration. "I just met Hayley Williams. She's so cool and she's so vocal and has such a crazy platform and is just so fearless with how she uses it," Brown said in my interview with them last August.

No matter the size of their stage, Water From Your Eyes do all they can to get their point across both implicitly and explicitly. This was the band's first time back in Philly since the opening show of their headline tour last September at the 250-cap bar venue Johnny Brenda's. "We only played through the set, like, one time before that show," Brown confessed during some stage banter.

They played the entirety (sparing the brief intro and outro) of last year's It's A Beautiful Place, with the band dancing and swaying through Brown's monotone delivery of lyrics about corruption and greed. Despite the compositional density of the music, WFYE make it look easy.

It was in between sets when I got my first taste of the poor concert etiquette that'd mar an otherwise incredible show. I thought that Williams would draw an older, calmer crowd, but even the adults in the room seemed to not know how to act. A group of four pushed up directly in front of my friend and I, and stared us down as if we were wrong to be annoyed. One of those four spent the whole set with two phones in her hands: one for texting, one for filming. There were moments between songs where fans could be heard barking and meowing, the most notable being right before "True Believer," a protest song about the bastardization of Christianity by the American conservative movement.

Despite the animalistic jeering, Williams' performance of that song was stunning. The instruments cloaked in white cloth mess with your object permanence, as if what you’re hearing is materializing out of thin air. As one could imagine, Williams' voice is tantalizing in ways that can barely be described with language. It's as soulful as it is sharp, and despite its fit for arenas, feels confident as ever in this smaller venue.

The set's narrative vehicle came in the form of a radio show complete with pharmaceutical ads for "Ego Death." The disembodied, robotic voice spoke for Williams while she was on stage. It drove the show's political messaging ("Ask your doctor about Ego Death – it's a prescription medication created to help you deconstruct expired systems and survive the daily onslaught of a sexist, racist, white supremacist, homophobic, and fascist country") and introduced the encore. It was cute and kitschy, but it wasn't necessarily a vital part of the show; the music spoke for itself.

The performances were played pretty straight, though Williams showed off her vocal chops with riffs and note changes throughout. Her stage presence reflects her status as a seasoned veteran, with her energy only increasing as the night went on.

If someone wasn't keen to it already, this show exemplified how revered Williams is by her peers. She's joined on this tour by longtime Paramore touring guitarist Brian Robert Jones, and their stage chemistry is strong as ever. I passed by Modern Baseball's Bren Lukens on my way out of the venue. Philly rapper Tierra Whack was brought on stage during "Good Ol' Days" to dance for about 20 seconds before scurrying offstage. At the beginning of the night, I spotted comedian Caleb Hearon sitting in the VIP balcony section, but by the end of the night he was joining Williams on stage for the final choruses of Ego Death's biggest hit "Parachute."

You could easily write Hearon's appearance off as yet another celebrity appearance gimmick that's been happening at every big pop tour the last couple years, but according to Hearon himself, his appearance was unplanned.

There was no pomp and circumstance when these guests were brought on stage. For once, a fun surprise at a show felt genuine and serendipitous as opposed to the meticulous and cross-promotional fodder concertgoers have grown accustom to.

The At A Bachelorette Party tour continues throughout the US and Europe the rest of this spring. What's already certain, though, is Hayley Williams is a living legend with plenty of creative juices left in the tank.