Last week the singer and songwriter Hayley Williams was sitting in her home in Nashville, where in her self-isolation she’s recently recorded an aerobics-themed music video and an acoustic Phoebe Bridgers cover. Through the computer screen, her coronavirus quarantine looked quiet, with a formidable table centerpiece plant in the background. Since she was a teenager in the mid-2000s, Williams’s band, Paramore, has often delivered its pop punk in tight, precise bursts for rapturous crowds. Now 31, she will release her first solo album, Petals for Armor, under more hushed circumstances on May 8.

But even before the current crisis, Williams hadn’t been planning on those arena-size live performances. This new phase of her career, she said in a video interview, has less to do with any changes to the status of the still-active band—however scrutinized those have been over its tenure—than a reconfigured approach to songwriting and performance that she wanted to explore. “I really needed this as an exercise in therapy,” Williams said. “I needed to just not think that this is going out into the world and this compares with the legacy with Paramore that I’ve contributed to and tried to build up over half my life.”

As Paramore became a Warped Tour stalwart in the 2000s, Williams became a leading avatar of the period for her captivating voice and open-hearted, infectious songwriting. The band eventually went multiplatinum and won a Grammy, and by then her electric performances and hairstyles—she now runs a vegan hair dye company called Good Dye Young—were already generational touchstones.

Years of performing took a toll on Paramore and led to a somewhat extended break after they finished touring their 2017 album, After Laughter. Williams found that writing under her name was a fitting outlet for both her newest work and a return to her earliest music. “When I was a teenager and I first met the guys and we started to write together, everything was so new and raw and we didn’t have a formula,” she said. “Many times my lyrics were just poetry that I’d write in my bedroom, and I’d bring a sheet of paper to practice.

“I found myself kind of back in that mode,” Williams continued.

The result, on Petals for Armor, is a varied mix of sounds and styles that fuses a meandering looseness with emotional acuity. The album’s lyrics broadly deal with anger and pain and how to process them while moving forward, and they stem from what Williams has described as a protracted period of personal turmoil: a 2017 separation from her nearly decade-long partner, the pop-punk band New Found Glory’s guitarist, Chad Gilbert, and a head injury that caused memory loss for her beloved grandmother.

“It felt right to own these stories for myself and challenge myself to believe in Hayley, the person,” Williams said. “Not as an extension of a band or letting Paramore be my identity, but really owning my shit and being like, I did all this. I've been through this, and I just need to get it out.”

While she’s been writing with some of her longtime collaborators, including Paramore members Taylor York, Joey Howard, and Zac Farro, “the biggest difference is how experimental I’ve been instrumentally,” Williams said. In places, some of the delicate arrangements of Petals for Armor use softer textures than Paramore is known for, and her vocal approach is unhurried. “I didn’t really warm up much while recording this,” she said. “I wanted to hear all of my vocal parts, the bad parts and the good parts.”

On After Laughter the band played into fresh territory, with ’80s New Wave influences, but carried over from its pop-punk days a commitment to sharp creases. “It’s not something that we ever plan,” Williams said, “but we do have a very concise way of wrapping up songs and albums, and it always feels right.” With her bandmates having established roles in Paramore’s process, she rarely felt the need to expand musically the way she did in writing Petals for Armor. Björk and Radiohead were the influences that the Talking Heads and Blondie were for After Laughter. (Williams trained with a vocal coach when she was 21 and lost her voice: “I geeked out when he told me he was Björk’s coach.”)

“I feel like I relax a lot into the role I have in Paramore,” Williams said. “And this wasn’t the time to relax.”

The album’s release date and tracklist haven’t changed because of the pandemic, but Williams remains concerned about what it will mean without a summer tour to follow. “It’s always such a nice full circle moment for my internal life to put [an album] out and share it as a conversation with people face-to-face,” she said. Meanwhile, some of the album’s quieter and darker songs were already released in the winter months, while a final portion of the album that picks up where After Laughter’s pep left off was intended for a more jubilant summer. “The album was really meant to open up,” Williams said. “It was meant to blossom.”

Throughout Williams’s early days with Paramore, her dynamism as a singer and performer was at the heart of the band’s range and appeal, even as it was closely associated with the emo aesthetics of the time. She was able to effectively carry her voice over, for instance, into some big tent pop forays with Zedd and B.o.B at the beginning of the ’10s.

Now that she’s pursuing stand-alone solo work, Williams sees it as a way to begin carving out her own musical future as well as Paramore’s. “I’ll probably write about some of the same shit when it comes time to make the next Paramore record,” she said, “but I know it’ll feel different. I just don’t know how.” And even if she’s strayed from the sound and model of when she was 17, Williams doesn’t view her current work as too vast a departure from what she was doing then. “I’ve been making music for two thirds of my life now, but I still wanna make things that are cool,” she said. “I still have that thing in me that’s very teenaged, that’s just like, I just want it to be so fucking cool.”

At this point in Williams’s career, that meant letting some air into her process even as she turned inward. “Dead Horse,” a rueful song about a sabotaged relationship, opens with a voice memo recorded on her phone while the song was being written. “I was really sad,” Williams remembered. She was trying to send her collaborator Daniel James a melody and lyrics for the song. “It took me three days to do it, and it was just a fucking voice note. It was just a recording in my bathroom,” she said. Her dog, Alf, started to bark, and she decided to let those seams show in the final recording: “Aw, man, we should just use it.”

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