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Hayley Williams has been outspoken about her thoughts on being considered an "emo nostalgia" band and the memories she's harbored from growing up in that scene.
In October, Paramore headlined the When We Were Young festival, and during a recent interview with Billboard she spoke about the experience.
“Everyone’s just trying to remember better days, and I’m sitting there like, ‘They weren’t that much better’,” the singer said.
While onstage during the festival, Williams opened up about how the scene wasn’t always a safe place “if you were different, if you were a young woman, if you were a person of color, if you were queer, and that’s really f**ked up if you think about it because this was supposed to be the safe place, wasn’t it?”
“We don’t want to be a nostalgia band,” she admitted in the interview. “But I think what I felt was a mixture of vindication and also a lot of anger."
She then addressed an inappropriate comment that NOFX's Fat Mike made about her when she was a teenager. “I was really surprised that I had so much anger well up in me because I was like, ‘Wait a minute. They’re treating us like a prize now,’ but like, Fat Mike used to tell people that I gave good rim jobs onstage when I was 19 years old," she said. “I do not think that that’s punk. I don’t think that’s the essence of punk. And I feel strongly that without young women, people of color and also the queer community, I just think we would still be where we were then."