Paramore have just unveiled their brand-new “almost” remix album, Re: This Is Why, featuring Foals, Julien Baker, Zane Lowe, The Linda Lindas, Bartees Strange and more.
The record consists of reimaginings of every song from this year’s brilliant This Is Why album, including single Running Out Of Time twice, plus a previously-unreleased demo called Sanity – which, according to Genius, is from the band’s After Laughter era.
Singer Hayley Williams had written an op-ed on mental health for Paper in 2018, and shared that Sanity came at a time when she was struggling.
“Taylor York and I were supposed to start writing for what would be our fifth album and I remember for the first time in a long time, I actually had an idea I wanted to send him,” Hayley wrote. “I almost cried when I found the lyrics in my phone the other day: ‘Sanity, why must you make a fool of me / You been a friend to me, now I think we’re enemies / When I fall on my knees I hear you laughing / When I call on your name, you don’t come.’
“We never finished it,” she added in 2018, “but that little verse was the first hint my subconscious gave me that I wasn’t okay. I wouldn’t get any others until after the piano fell, right on top of me.”
In a personal note about the new album as a whole, Hayley says: “We sent This Is Why – the record – out into the world early this year, with all its messages of disdain, distrust, and sobering self-examination.
“This is the Reply.”
Listen to Re: This Is Why below: