Hayley Williams’ Album Features A Song With Boygenius

Lera Pentelute

Hayley Williams’ Album Features A Song With Boygenius

Lera Pentelute

This spring, Paramore leader Hayley Williams will release Petals For Armor, her first-ever solo album. Williams has already shared half of the LP , but that means that there’s still half of the songs that we haven’t heard yet. And today brings the exciting news that one of those as-yet-unheard songs is a collaboration with boygenius, the currently-dormant supergroup of Julien Baker, Phoebe Bridgers, and Lucy Dacus.

As Brooklyn Vegan points out, Williams is the subject of a new profile from New York Times writer and editor Caryn Ganz, and she mentions the boygenius collab in the article. Williams is friends with Julien Baker, who was opening shows for Paramore back in 2017. And on the Petals For Armor title track, all three members of boygenius sing backup. Here’s how Ganz puts it:

One of [Williams’] confidants, the singer and songwriter Julien Baker, said she and Williams were bonded by “being raised culturally Christian in the South then coming into the world” of music. “She has an innate connection with the deeply emotionally profound and really wants to explore those things in an honest way with people,” Baker said in a phone interview. “But also she is a uniquely disarming person.” Baker, Phoebe Bridgers and Lucy Dacus — the trio boygenius — provide backing vocals on a “Petals for Armor” song about “wilted women” moving toward the light.

This is very good news for a lot of reasons. It speaks well of Williams’ artistic ambitions and of her taste in friends and collaborators. It’ll be great to hear those three voices together again, especially paired up with someone like Hayley Williams. And it’s also an encouraging sign that boygenius are a continuing concern. The trio released a truly great EP in 2018 and linked up for a by-all-accounts amazing tour around the same time, but since then, they’ve all focused on their other endeavors. But maybe, when the time is right, we’ll get more boygenius.

UPDATE (3/8): Hayley Williams has shared the lyrics to the new song that features Boygenius, which is called “Roses/Lotus/Violet/Iris.” She also texted someone who was, um, not Julien Baker. See below.

Petals For Armor is out 5/8 on Atlantic.

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