Generally speaking, a debut album is a chance for a band or musician to prove themselves. Usually, there’s not the weight of previous expectations, so an artist is usually gifted a blank canvas of sorts. For almost any pop punk // alternative rock // emo band that emerged in the 2000s, though, the results almost certainly had to be immediate. With album sales continuing to dwindle with the rise of file sharing outlets like LimeWire, the fact is that it was more important for new bands of the era to have a strong debut right out of the gate. While it didn’t always happen commercially for every band, establishing a fan base early on was an essential component of what made bands like this blow up across the board in that decade.
Paramore was not the only exception (actually, they weren’t one at all). While their 2005 debut album All We Know Is Falling wasn’t an immediate success, it did enable the band time to gain a fan base in a more organic fashion. When you also realize how young the band was when they released an album, it’s all the more impressive. Keep in mind, they were barely teenagers. Hayley Williams proved to be a gifted vocalist from day one on sounds like “Pressure”, “Emergency”, and “My Heart”. It also explains the quantum leap in songwriting abilities two years later on Riot!, which broke them open into the mainstream. Still, for a debut by a group of teenagers, it’s not hard to see why it set them up for success. In fact, the youthful nature of AWKIF is a big reason why Paramore fans have continued to grow up with the band themselves, despite stylistic changes.
