Paramore live in New York City: still at the top of their game

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e’re only a few short minutes into a blazing Tuesday night set at Madison Square Garden (May 30), and it’s been made abundantly clear that Hayley Williams, the small yet colossal voice standing on top of all of Paramore’s music, has cornered the market on righteous rage. Wearing a sheer retro-style sequin dress, she spits, kicks, and treats the stage like a playground as guitarist Taylor York and drummer Zac Farro share with her bubbling energy.

It’s been a decade since the last time the Nashville, Tennessee pop-punk instigators took the stage at the legendary Manhattan venue, and as Williams notes right after a roaring rendition of their sinister, spiralling track, ‘You First’, a lot has changed since then. “Last time we were here 10 years ago, we didn’t fill up Madison Square Garden,” she says. “It was close, but it was nowhere near close to filling up twice.” The crowd breaks into cheers, the stage flashes with red and white lights and the opening distorted guitars of ‘The News’ fill up the arena.

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The band move through the night as many MSG players do, with confetti, pyro, dramatic set changes and encores. The most delightful difference to many of those shows is the diverse faces filling up the seats in the venue, a stark contrast to the typical homogenous make-up of most of the City’s rock shows. It’s become a trademark for the band’s gig attendance and their overall presence in the music scene, one where they’ve made it abundantly clear that all are welcome, and if that doesn’t sit well with you? “Get that fuck out”, Williams warns.

Williams double downs on this point halfway through the set, while the band plays the hardcore-esque call back inciting track ‘Figure 8’. Amid the crowd’s responses of “And once I get going / I don’t know how to stop / I don’t know how to stop”, she notices a fight in the audience. “What is happening?” she asks two fans in a scuffle before adding, “Yes, I will embarrass both of you. Both of you need to find somewhere else to take care of that shit because that’s not happening here tonight,” she says, before adding a defiant, “This is our house.”

It’s not easy to transform one of the world’s most legendary venues into your own house, but Paramore are up for the feat. New tracks like ‘Crave’ and ‘Big Man Little Dignity’ from their recently released album, ‘This Is Why’, are met with the same energy from fans as the band’s earlier hits, like ‘Decode’ and ‘That’s What You Get’.

‘Ain’t It Fun’, ‘Misery Business’, and ‘Hard Time’ incite a bombastic blur of dancing, screaming, and singing along from the stands that makes you wonder if they’re overhearing the echoes somewhere in Brooklyn. But the earnest way they play, the gratitude they share in between songs for their fans that have joined them on this two-decade journey, is what follows you out of the venue.

“We’ve stayed in,” Williams says towards the set’s close, right before a mass of confetti flutters over our heads as they close with the staggering, crawling title-track of their most recent album. “We’ve stayed cosy. We’ve had some fucking boundaries,” she adds. Although she’s talking about the night, it’s not hard to think that she could be talking about the beautiful space Paramore have created for themselves and their fans as well.

Paramore played:

‘You First’
‘The News’
‘That’s What You Get’
‘Playing God’
‘Caught In The Middle’
‘Rose Colored Boy’
‘Running Out Of Time’
‘Decode’
‘Last Hope’
‘Big Man Little Dignity’
‘Liar’
‘Crystal Clear’
‘Hard Times’
‘Told You So’
‘Figure 8’
‘The Only Exception’
‘Baby’
‘Crave’
‘Misery Business’
‘Ain’t It Fun’
‘Still Into You’
‘This Is Why’

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