“Every time we do a record, I get so married to who we are in that moment that I’m scared for us to go be something else,” Hayley Williams admitted to Apple Music in 2017. “Because what if we’re not as good at that?” Her tenure as frontwoman for Paramore has given her plenty of opportunities to conquer that fear. Even from their 2004 inception in the suburbs of Nashville, Paramore’s identity was constantly in flux. Initially signed as a solo artist to Atlantic Records—which had designs on turning her into the next Kelly Clarkson—Williams insisted on including her high-school pals in her pursuits, forming a band that reflected the harder alt-rock sounds she was more naturally drawn to. Atlantic acquiesced by grooming Paramore on their indie-leaning subsidiary Fueled by Ramen, where the group debuted with 2005’s All We Know Is Falling. On their early records, Paramore updated the candy-coated angst of Avril Lavigne with the urgent emo-schooled dynamics of Jimmy Eat World, but recurring personnel changes would reformulate the band’s chemistry on an album-by-album basis. Alongside peers like Fall Out Boy and Panic! At the Disco, Paramore gradually pushed pop-punk out of the mosh pit and past the velvet rope. And as the band crossed over via acoustic coffeehouse ballads (2009’s “The Only Exception”) and breezy, gospel-infused funk (the Grammy-winning 2013 single “Ain’t It Fun”), Williams seized the mantle of the Warped Tour generation’s foremost feminist voice, even disavowing their first Top 40 hit, the 2008 love-triangle rager “Misery Business”, for lyrics that painted the other woman in a nasty light. After a four-year hiatus, Paramore reinvented themselves as a tropical-disco troupe for 2017’s After Laughter, a Top 10-crashing comeback that once again proved Williams’ aforementioned fears to be wholly unfounded.