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.”