Paramore Member Zac Farro Announces Solo Album ‘Operator’

Zac Farro has scattered himself across three musical entities. There’s HalfNoise, the psych-rock band he formed in 2010, and most obviously, there’s Paramore, the genre-spanning band he slipped away from that same year and returned to seven years later. The drummer found a balance between the two projects. For a while, there were no musical ideas left without a home. But Farro’s forthcoming studio album Operator won’t arrive as a product of Paramore or HalfNoise. It’s the first record he’ll release as just himself.

“My My,” the first release from the album, marks another genre switch, this time to country-folk. In a statement, Farro describes the record as being “a personal song about witnessing a loved one try to let go of someone they care for deeply. That kind of silent pain. This song holds a lot of weight and captures those moments of reflection and processing that run throughout the album.”

Out July 18 via his own Congrats Records, Operator holds onto influences of rock and hazy psychedelia. The sonic details will wrap around thematic threads about anxiety, overthinking, communication (or lack thereof), family relationships, and more on the nine-song tracklist. Farro created the record with Nashville’s Josh Gilligan and Chancey Pierce. I’ve always had such a vision, even sometimes the name of an album, before I go in,” he said. “This one was like, if we’re together, the magic will reveal itself. And it did.”

HalfNoise’s most recent record, City Talk, arrived in November 2023, just a few months after Paramore returned with This Is Why. “As a writer, he surprises me all the time because his voice is so good,” Paramore’s Hayley Williams told Rolling Stone about her long-time bandmate that same year. “He writes melodies that I get jealous of, and I’ll be like, ‘Goddammit, why didn’t I say this in the song?’ And Taylor [York] will write stuff and show me and Zac and I’ll be so scared of how the fuck I’m supposed to enter into it as a singer. Not only do they challenge me, and they teach me, and we all learn from each other.”

Operator Track List:
1. “Operator”
2. “Second Chance”
3. “1”
4. “Simple Actions”
5. “My My”
6. “Gold Days”
7. ‘All I Really Want Now’
8. ‘Sunday Driving’
9. “I Need You”