![]() O’Connell’s ear-catching yet understated production-skeletal reggae with dog snarls on “ I Didn’t Change My Number,” a charmingly lazy bass line on “ Lost Cause”-helps her blows land cleanly.Įilish’s supposedly peaceful inner sanctum, the self independent of others, remains gated. Each interlocking line of lyric builds a kind of logical momentum her variegated deadpan is so committed that it should actually be considered hammy. Accordingly, the album’s delicacies are dis tracks, which highlight Eilish’s oddly Broadway-ish knack as a performer-storyteller. Instead it is a speech from the top of a mountain, directed downward-at grasping fans, prying reporters, crappy exes, and exploitative power brokers, all of whom she insists bother her less now. Happier Than Ever is not really about this emotional journey. Read: How pop music’s teenage dream ended “I fucking love fame,” she said on a podcast this year. But with therapy and age (“like the actual chemicals in my brain shifting,” she told the Los Angeles Times), she got better. Losing privacy and independence-and gaining judgmental audiences, industry pressures, and a grueling schedule-made her wish she’d never blown up. Eilish’s first brush with fame horrified her, according to press interviews and footage in her 2021 tour documentary, The World’s a Little Blurry. Such restraint, we’re meant to feel, reflects hard-won self-assurance. It contains many of the same ingredients as before, but they’re used in sparing proportions to create subtler and-in the best moments-richer payoffs. The follow-up-created again by Eilish and her multi-instrumentalist brother, Finneas O’Connell-is muted, cold, and controlled. ![]() The joke embedded in the rollout for Eilish’s Happier Than Ever is that it’s significantly less joyful to listen to than When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? That debut had a kind of Nightmare Before Christmas playfulness to it, with shuffling rhythms and silly sound effects augmenting the haunted sing-alongs. In this summer of uneasy celebration, some of pop’s most thoughtful women are showing that pleasure-for themselves, for other women, for everyone-is anything but simple. But listen to all this music and gauge the reactions to it, and you still can’t quite make the case that our culture is perking up. Eilish telegraphs a swerve with her album’s name, Happier Than Ever, and its associated visuals: blond locks and creamy colors instead of goth greens and blacks. Lana Del Rey’s March album, Chemtrails Over the Country Club, meditates on nature, community, and contentment. Lorde’s single “Solar Power” is a strummed summer gust. She was a Sad Girl™, building explicitly on the 2010s’ most important whispering divas, Lorde and Lana Del Rey.Īll three women have released new music this year, and all three seem to be scraping off the sad tag. But she also joined a lineage coded along gender (and, more subtly, racial) lines. ![]() The influence of Drake, that self-doubting superstar, permeated Eilish’s shadowy, rap-inflected sound. Her success also capped off a decade during which popular music made more space for malaise in its melodies. Speaking openly about depression and self-harm, the now-19-year-old Eilish became a powerful mascot for a generation of young Americans who are, according to studies, extraordinarily sad. Read: How pop’s biggest weirdo swept the Grammys The song, “Listen Before I Go,” faded out in a din of sirens. At the climax of the album’s runtime, she sang a farewell from the edge of a building. Monsters, the apocalypse, and suicide swirled in her thoughts-and the drama of the songs lay in the sense that she could, in some awful turn, fall victim to the things that terrorized her. ![]() Her 2019 debut, When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?, swept the major Grammy categories and sold millions of copies with cleverly constructed tales of feeling not okay. “For anybody asking,” Eilish sings, “I promise I’ll be fine.”įine has not always been Eilish’s thing. It never seems to explode, but the final verse does contain a shock. She murmurs about these things over a synthesizer that pulses like a time bomb. Loneliness and burnout mount in her mind. Billie Eilish has some scary problems, she tells listeners on her new album’s first song, “Getting Older.” A stranger outside her door is acting deranged. ![]()
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