Hayley Williams announces why Paramore will no longer perform breakout single 'Misery Business' at live shows

'We feel like it’s time to move away from it for a little while'

Hayley Williams has announced that her band Paramore will no longer play their breakout single “Misery Business” at live shows.

Midway through a special one-off performance at their hometown of Nashville on Friday (7 September), Williams took a moment to reflect on why they would be retiring the track “for a long time”.

“This is a choice we made because we feel like we should,” she said before playing the song. “We feel like it’s time to move away from it for a little while.

“This is to every bad decision that led us here, this is to all the embarrassing things we might have said, but we owned up to it and we grew.”

Williams has previously distanced herself from the track after taking issue with the line: ”Once a whore, you’re nothing more / I’m sorry that’ll never change.”

In a 2015 Tumblr post, she addressed complaints about the song being ‘anti-feminist’, writing: “’Misery Business’ is not a set of lyrics that I relate to as a 26-year-old woman. I haven’t related to it in a very long time. Those words were written when I was 17… Admittedly, from a very narrow-minded perspective.”

“Misery Business” was Paramore’s first mainstream hit, reaching number 26 in the Billboard charts. The song was certified triple platinum in the US in 2015. Over 400,000 copies of the song have been sold in the UK.

Meanwhile, Paramore have completed touring their 2017 album After Laughter. The record was a departure in sound for the band, taking inspiration from disco and eighties new-wave rather than punk-rock.