Paramore
After Laughter

After a whole four years of silence since the release of Paramore, the self-titled album released in 2013, this Nashville band is - more or less - making a comeback with a new work, titled After Laughter.

I emphasize more or less because in Italy the latest effort of the American band has actually passed with disdainful silence.

Yet with this new album, Paramore seems to want to take a decisive turn in their career, definitively abandoning the pop-punk roots that characterized the sound of their previous works. And thankfully, I might add!

In this sense, the last album released, Paramore, was already an attempt, albeit still insufficient and awkward, to innovate their musical offering.

For several years, the band has been desperately trying to break away from the label of emo band for teenagers, which, however, seems destined to hang over their heads like a Damocles' sword for a long time yet.

Now with this After Laughter the band takes the decisive step by crafting an album that is pleasant, solid, and at the same time smooth and easily enjoyable.

From the very first track (which is also the first single released), "Hard Times," the listener is immersed in a pleasantly pop and groovy atmosphere, distinctly 80s, characterized by a heavy use of synths.

The album, although cohesive and homogeneous in its 12 tracks (not too many but not too few either), also reserves some surprises for the listener. For example, there's an intimate and acoustic moment, found in the song "26," a heartbreaking ballad for just guitar and voice, with a hint of strings at the end. The album's closure, "Tell Me How," is also a ballad, in which for the first time a piano makes its appearance.

At the same time, there are also faster and, with a lot of quotes, "rock" songs, with some distortion seemingly placed there to please a few die-hard fans of their early work who might be bitter about the change in direction.

The intent, indeed, is a conciliatory and somewhat sly one, wanting to please everyone.

An exception can be found in the track "No Friend," the least commercial of the bunch. The track is a post-hardcore song, a single crescendo in which Hayley Williams does not sing, but instead Aaron Weiss, singer, and lyricist of mewithoutYou, Williams's and my favorite band. It's clear that the intent with this track was just to have fun, as if to confirm the genuineness of an album that seems anything but a commercial operation.

After Laughter is the pop revelation of the year. It's a fun album, to be lived, to be danced to. It's an album to enjoy simply without wanting to hold your nose at all costs.

Score out of ten: 7/10

They convinced me: "Rose-Colored Boy," "Fake Happy," "Pool," "Caught In The Middle"

They convinced me less: "Forgiveness," "No Friend"