Hayley Williams headlined the Friday night of Newport Folk Festival 2026 with a set billed as "Hayley Williams & Friends," and the friends arrived in force: Karly Hartzman of Wednesday, Jenny Lewis, Jack Antonoff, Lucy Dacus and Remi Wolf all joined her on stage across the evening. The festival, now in its 67th year at Fort Adams State Park in Newport, Rhode Island, ran from 24 to 26 July 2026. Williams opened the set with the title track from her solo album Ego Death at a Bachelorette Party, according to Pitchfork.

The night's guest spots moved quickly. Hartzman came out to perform "Mirtazapine," a song from the same album. Antonoff, the producer and Bleachers frontman, joined Williams for "Good Ol' Days" and "I Wanna Get Better" — the latter a solo Antonoff single from 2014. Lewis sang Rilo Kiley's "Silver Lining" alongside Williams and her band, and Dacus took the stage for "Roses/Lotus/Violet/Iris," a track from Williams' 2020 debut solo album Petals for Armor. Wolf debuted a new song titled "Twiggy Little Butt" in collaboration with Williams.

For Williams, the set carried a particular weight. Songs from both Petals for Armor (2020) and Flowers for Vases / Descansos (2021) received their live debut at Newport — her original tour plans for those records were scrapped when the Covid-19 pandemic shut down live music in 2020. The solo material has existed on record for years; at Fort Adams, audiences heard it from a stage for the first time.

Williams is best known as the frontwoman of Paramore, the band she co-founded in Franklin, Tennessee, in 2004. Her solo work departs from that band's rock-rooted sound, leaning into art-pop and experimental textures, and the "Friends" billing reflected that spirit of collaboration rather than a conventional headliner-plus-support format.

The evening closed with every guest returning to the stage for a group sing-along of Bill Withers' 1972 single "Lean on Me." It was a fitting end to a set built entirely around shared songs.