EGO DEATH AT A BACHELORETTE PARTY BY HAYLEY WILLIAMS (2025)
RATING: 9.5/10

I thought I’d kick off my music blogging experience with one of the strongest albums of the 2020s (in my humble opinion). Easily a masterpiece from start to finish, Ego Death at a Bachelorette Party encapsulates what it means to be a world-weary millennial woman in a world full of hypermasculinity, racism, gun violence, and shitty country music. Hayley Williams does not hold back at all in letting Nashville and the rest of the world know that she’s unstoppable, but still introspective and sensitive to the world’s issues.

When I listen to Ego Death, I get goosebumps right from the very beginning. My favorite track hits right away… I absolutely adore Ice in my OJ. If you don’t know the lore behind the song, Hayley Williams was once in a children’s Christian group and the lyrics in the first verse are sampled from one of their songs. That extra layer of delicious irony and self-reference makes the whole song so, so good. It’s got a bit of grit and sass, it makes you feel tough just listening to it. It tells the story of a girl who started at the absolute bottom and somehow ended up at the top of the world, without literally telling the story word for word. To me, an album that starts like this really can only go up from here.

Honestly, my suspicions about going uphill were completely correct with the next track on the list, Glum. Ice in My OJ transitions so smoothly and effortlessly into a melancholy, anxious piece about loneliness and despair. The transition itself is a metaphor for how even the toughest people can live secret lives where everything really does bother them and nothing seems to help. It seems a bit simplistic when you read the lyrics but at the end of the day, Glum is an earnest song about how shitty things like depression and anxiety actually are. If someone as cool as Hayley Williams can admit to having those kinds of thoughts, it opens up the door to a wider dialogue about mental health, and I appreciate that.

My second favorite song on this album is the third track, Kill Me. I felt the message of this song so deeply, on a personal level. “Carrying my mother’s mother’s torment” feels almost ripped directly from my own family history… and what’s crazy is, there are so many of us that know how it feels. “I guess this is where the bloodline ends” meaning, knowing your family history and choosing not to contribute. It’s a hard subject in an era where it seems like we’re moving backwards in terms of women’s rights to have (or not have) children. Choosing not to have kids is still quite controversial somehow. Kill Me is the ultimate anthem for the overlooked and underappreciated eldest daughter with the weight of the world hanging over her head.

I want to skip ahead because although the next couple of songs are good in their own right, there are two more in the center of the album that quite frankly steal the show from all the other songs on the album.

The title track, Ego Death at a Bachelorette Party, has a chill backing track with lyrics that betray its nature. This is not a chill song; it’s an aggressive callout that makes a reference to Morgan Wallen. If you don’t know who Morgan Wallen is, please spare yourself the google search and take my word that literally anyone (except maybe Kid Rock) is a better artist, and much less racist at that. While Morgan Wallen and fellow racist country singers might own bars on Broadway in Nashville, the only person everyone wants to see performing there is Hayley Williams. She’s once again letting us know that she’s at the top of her game, beloved, and not afraid to make weak racist men cower. I love it.

The piece de resistance of the album, the crown jewel of bittersweet odes to one’s country, is True Believer. It’s not just a song about gentrification or racism, it’s about still having faith that one day things will be better. But make no mistake, it is very much an anti-racist ballad, making a reference to the poem Strange Fruit and children holding weapons larger than their bodies in their Christmas portraits. Hearing the song for the first time, I truly got shivers and goosebumps. The pain, the frustration, the ironies, the longing for a time that once was… you mourn along with Hayley. It’s a mirror held back into the face of a post-Trump America, saying, “Look at the shape of you!”. I’m really surprised that this song did not end up winning a Grammy… kind of a robbery in my opinion, but I digress.

There are several other truly wonderful songs on Ego Death. I’m sure I could go on and on about Parachute or Hard, for instance. I’ve just chosen to highlight the true peaks of the album. Feel free to let me know if you’d like to hear more about this particular album from me, but I feel like I’ve yapped enough here. Needless to say, this album was played heavily in my household in the past year. Songs from it randomly get stuck in my head all the time. Maybe it’s because I’m the eldest, childfree daughter with a cursed family and a deep longing for an America that doesn’t exist anymore, but I really fell in love with Ego Death at a Bachelorette Party. I hope if you haven’t heard it yet, you give it a try. And listen to it from first to last, don’t shuffle!