Now I can move on to facing big girl problems
No more high school drama,
graduated with honors

Three years ago this month, Paramore split in two.

After the band announced that founding members Josh and Zac Farro were leaving its ranks, the brothers scorched the earth on their way out with a lengthy Blogger post outlining, from their point of view, what was actually going on inside the Tennessee-based pop-punk outfit. The picture they painted was that of an earnest Christian rock band co-opted by managers and a major label trying to turn a pretty young girl into a major star. It’s not that Paramore wasn’t a real band or anything; it’s that, according to the Farros, the band often felt decidedly beside the point.

The response from the remaining members of Paramore — aired as an MTV.com interview called “The Last Word” — both challenged the spirit of the brothers’ statement and confirmed some of the facts. (For example, that vocalist Hayley Williams was, in fact, the only band member signed to Atlantic.) The whole scenario played perfectly into the rockist conspiracy theorist mindset that still lingers in the “pop”-ulace: shadowy figures manipulating the music landscape one attractive face at a time and reaping the profits. That Williams had just had a huge hit single at the time as a guest vocalist on B.O.B.’s “Airplanes” added another unfortunate shred of truthiness to the tale.

It took the band’s remaining members — Williams, bassist Jeremy Davis, and rhythm guitarist Taylor York — more than two years after the split to release a proper follow-up to 2009’s somewhat disappointing Brand New Eyes. Without two of its original members, and with doubts circling about the band’s authenticity, you’d be forgiven for not betting on much from Paramore.

Instead, the band ended up with 2013’s great, underappreciated rock record.

I say “underappreciated” despite the fact that, critically and commercially, Paramore’s self-titled third album has been reasonably well received. Second single “Still Into You” has been a modest hit, peaking at number 24 on the Billboard Hot 100 and selling more than 500,000 downloads. The album topped the charts in its first week with 106,000 in sales and went gold in the UK (though I can’t find any sign of it doing so in America yet). And, for the most part, critics enjoyed the album: it has an 81 rating on Metacritic with solid reviews from Spin, The AV Club, and others.

But I have a funny feeling that the general “like” out there for Paramore isn’t going to translate into the year-end list placements the album deserves. No guitar record this year entertained me, surprised me, and kept me returning the way Paramore did. When it aims for lightness, it soars. When it tries for heavy, it thunders. It’s not flawless by any stretch of the imagination; it’s perhaps a few tracks too long, and the mix tosses aside dynamic range in favour of persistent loudness. But at a time when guitar rock has become a nostalgia exercise, it’s thrilling to hear a band fighting for, and attaining, a place for capital-R Rock in the current pop landscape.

Paramore succeeds by balancing the two sides of pop’s tense equilibrium: fulfillment and surprise. It’s an album of big choruses that take you exactly where you expected and hoped, with songs like “Proof,” “Be Alone” and “Daydreaming” building tension in the verses before exploding in gloriously catchy walls of distortion. The choruses move quickly, too; credit Nine Inch Nails drummer Ilan Rubin, whose chemistry with bassist Davis gives the album its propulsion and drive.

But if you spent any time at all with Riot!, the band’s breakthrough debut, you know Paramore can find its way around a snappy hook. It’s Paramore’s sonic playfulness that elevates it above anything else the band has done to date. It’s full of moments that make your ears perk up and keep you off guard through the record: the swoony synth outro of “Grow Up”; the out-of-nowhere gospel choir in “Ain’t It Fun” that somehow totally works; the blisteringly tossed-off “Anklebiters” that doesn’t so much end as collapse at the finish line.

Perhaps the biggest surprise, though, is just how much physical heft the album has. There’s no shortage of sugary-sweet pop melodies on the record — “(One of Those) Crazy Girls” is perhaps the best Weezer song of the past decade — but then you get to a track like first single “Now,” a song based around a fuzzed-out riff and a manipulated chorus vocal that attacks with real bite. The stunner here is album-closer “Future,” a sweetly-picked acoustic song that slowly becomes consumed by a swelling tide of noise. The moment the wave crashes into the mix is one of the heaviest moments on any record this year — and it’s on a PARAMORE album.

But why should we be so surprised by that?

Say what you will about Riot! and Brand New Eyes, but those records certainly aren’t lacking for physical energy. The band came of age in the wake of the oft-annoying pop-punk wave of the mid-2000s, but that era’s best bands, separated from the scene itself, are reasonably well appreciated. (It’s not just nostalgia, for example, that made Fall Out Boy’s Save Rock and Roll such a success this year; quite the opposite, actually — like Paramore, it’s a spirited album fighting for guitar rock’s relevancy in the here and now.)

Perhaps, then, it’s skepticism about Hayley Williams that’s the culprit; after all, wasn’t the big takeaway of the Farros’ statement that the powers-that-be circling Paramore saw her as a future pop star in the making? For all poptimism’s gains over the past decade, there’s still an undercurrent in music culture that all-too-easily dismisses a female vocalist in a band of dudes (especially if she doesn’t play an instrument). That Williams’ lyrics have been so expressively “teenage” in the past — all fluttering romance and snarky adolescence — probably didn’t help matters.

But the girl could always sing, and on Paramore she’s on another level. She keeps up with the gospel choir on “Ain’t it Fun,” she sells the soft release of “Hate to See Your Heart Break,” and she wonderfully sneaks traces of her Tennessee accent into “Proof’s” gigantic chorus.

Lyrically, Williams has grown into adulthood in a way that’s akin to a more-celebrated real-life friend of hers—though she lacks Taylor Swift’s ability for uncanny instant nostalgia, Williams is similarly great at celebrating the fundamentally teenage-ness of romance even as the experiences she’s writing about feel older, more lived-in. A song like “Be Alone” marries adult confidence in its verses with adolescent sentiment in the chorus, while “Still Into You” makes this theme explicit: a song about feeling teenage feelings for someone you’ve known for years.

And maybe that tension reflects what makes Paramore so satisfying: it seems to want to be a little bit of everything. When Williams sings “we’ve got our riot gear on but we just want to have fun” in opener “Fast in My Car” — the song that’s most explicitly about the band and its split — she’s not just referencing the band’s past, but its present as well. Paramore is an album that wants to dance around the bedroom with steel-toed boots on. It’s got fighting spirit and a fevered heart. It marries amazing pop hooks with real rock chops. It’s surprising, it’s fun, and it’s unquestionably one of 2013’s best.