Paramore have returned after five years with a brand new album This Is Why. The band had taken a break after touring their 2017 album After Laughter.

Their first album since After Laughter will release on February 10, 2023. The band released the title song on Wednesday.

“’This Is Why’ was the very last song we wrote for the album,” the band’s Hayley Williams said in a press release. “To be honest, I was so tired of writing lyrics but Taylor convinced Zac and I both that we should work on this last idea. What came out of it was the title track for the whole album. It summarizes the plethora of ridiculous emotions, the rollercoaster of being alive in 2022, having survived even just the last 3 or 4 years. You’d think after a global pandemic of fucking biblical proportions and the impending doom of a dying planet, that humans would have found it deep within themselves to be kinder or more empathetic or something.”

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Giving the reason behind the enforced break, the band said that they “realised nothing is worth risking our health.”

Frontwoman Williams told The Guardian that the openness of the After Laughter campaign enabled Paramore to “more than ever [become] a support system to each other that we desperately needed.”

Guitarist Taylor York spoke about how he learned of the death of a family friend during a video shoot for a single from the album.

“I just started bawling. I didn’t know I had this capacity until that moment,” York recalled.

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The band decided to pause to “see what it’s like to not hang our identities on Paramore all the time.”

While on the break, York gave up alcohol and decided to “explore some deeper parts of myself and figure out why we do this, how it happened.”

“I’m a very introverted person and I have a passion and career that’s at odds with that,” he added. “When it came back to doing [Paramore] again, I was able to say confidently, let’s do it. Zac [Farro] and Hayley both needed to know that I wanted to do this.”