Billie Eilish - Happier Than Ever

The Quietus

It feels fitting at an almost cosmic level that Billie Eilish’s beautifully unnerving second album should be released days after last rites were proclaimed on Simon Cowell’s The X Factor. There is a sense of one era belatedly ending and another beginning. It’s like spring following an ice age where all the mega fauna had Jedward quiffs and crooned like Harry Styles.

The X Factor and Cowell’s perspective on stardom was that the mogul was as influential as the musician. But Eilish’s career stands as a rebuttal of the proposal that the people behind the scenes are as important as the one in the spotlight. She embodies the concept of pop star as auteur. And, if the idea is hardly new, few have inhabited it as persuasively and thrillingly as the nineteen-year-old Los Angeles native.

Happier Than Ever is a record of many layers and nuances. It is primarily a deep dive into the dark side of overnight celebrity and the internet’s industrial-scale objectification of young stars. But the project is also is a study in loneliness and a baroque, at times almost gothic, picking apart of adolescent melancholia. It’s Lindsay Anderson directing an episode of HBO’s Euphoria. Or Edward Gorey illustrating Judy Blume.

You can dance to it, sing to it, drive too fast to it. Yet Happier Than Ever works best without outside distraction, so that the textures both of Eilish’s voice and of the rococo production can be fully appreciated.

When Eilish emerged in 2016 with the single ‘Ocean Eyes’ and the follow-up 2017 EP, Don’t Smile At Me, it was obvious she represented some kind a break from the tropes of mainstream pop. Amid the disembodied beats and guttural grooves, she and producer (and older sibling) Finneas sounded more indebted to early Nine Inch Nails than to the Max Martin school of turbo-charged chart stompers.

There is nothing at all wrong with turbo-charged chart stompers. Amid the recent outpouring of support for Britney Spears, for instance, it has been telling that people are finally giving themselves permission to admit to liking her music. But Eilish was coming from somewhere else. The defining quality of her work was its razor-edged ennui.

Those barbs continue to glitter on Happier Than Ever. However, she takes a new direction with her lyrics, no longer tapping her fear of monsters under the bed or anxieties about insomnia. Now the monster is stalking her on Instagram or resides in the scrum of paps lying in ambush whenever she leaves the house.

“I didn’t change my number,” she whispers on the song of the same name, sounding like a Warhammer 40K Billie Holiday. ”I only changed who I believe in.” She could be addressing any number of people. Her ex, Brandon Adams. The fans whose adoration has becoming increasingly possessive. Or maybe she is talking to the whole world – the people who know her only from Instagram and from gossipy websites.

Happier Than Ever is several records in one. At moments, it lands with a crushing hush, Eilish’s vocals folded into layers of ghost-like piano and percussion. Yet when it rouses itself from this troubled slumber, it hits like forked lightning. ‘Billie Bossa Nova’, for instance, is a finger-clicking ghost-train ride (though the sentiments are gooey by her standards: she seems to be addressing a prospective love interest). And on ‘Oxytocin’ – named for the prescription painkiller – she radiates a nightmarish menace. It’s half banger, half bad dream from which you cannot awaken.

Asked to explain what set stars such as Lana Del Rey, Lorde, and Taylor Swift apart, producer Jack Antonoff recently told the Irish Times that it came down to their willingness and ability “to tell a hyper-personal story in a hyper-personal way”. Eilish has that gift too and on Happier Than Ever her diary entries are variously raw and unnerving.

Simon Cowell, among other moguls, would never have allowed her to venture to those places. And that perhaps goes to the heart of Eilish’s appeal. She’s made a big shiny pop LP that also chronicles the experiences of a teenager on an emotional downward spiral and wondering when and if they will see daylight again.

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Pitchfork 76

Read Quinn Moreland’s review of the album.

The Guardian 0

(Darkroom/Interscope)
On perhaps the most anticipated album of 2021, Eilish uses subdued yet powerful songwriting to consider how fame has seeped into every corner of her life

“I’m getting older,” sings Billie Eilish, who’s 19, on Happier Than Ever’s opening track. “I’ve got more on my shoulders”, she adds, which is certainly true. Her debut album When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? wasn’t just a huge global hit, but an album that significantly altered mainstream pop music. Two years on, streaming services are clotted with bedroom-bound, teenage singer-songwriters dolefully depicting their lives: anticipation for what the genuine article does next is understandably running very high.

When We All Fall Asleep … was an album that turned universal teenage traumas – romance, hedonism, friendship groups – into knowingly lurid horror-comic fantasies, in which tongues were stapled, friends buried, hearses slept in and marble walls spattered with blood. That playfulness is less evident on its successor. It flickers occasionally, as on Overheated’s exploration of stardom in the era of social media, complete with death threats (“You wanna kill me? You wanna hurt me?” she mumbles, before giggling: “Stop being flirty”) or on NDA, where the “pretty boy” she entices home is required to sign the titular legal agreement before he leaves. But the overall tone is noticeably more sombre.

Related: Billie Eilish: Your Power review – chilling ballad seeps under your skin

The Guardian 0

(Darkroom/Interscope/Polydor)
The teenage alt-pop sensation grows up and gets loose on her bold, retro-toned second album

The court of public opinion is never out of session, especially when the creative in the dock is a young woman. The second album by Billie Eilish – the still-teenage singer-songwriter and Grammy-magnet – lands amid a backlash to her success (seven Grammys to date; Happier Than Ever has had more Apple Music listeners add it to their libraries before its release than any other album).

In recent weeks, Eilish has been accused of queerbaiting and tacit racism. Previously, there has been dismay over how she swapped the green hair and roomy hip-hop threads she wore for her debut, When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go (2019), for platinum blond locks and even corsetry (for a British Vogue shoot).

Eilish is both an old soul and a young woman coming into her sexuality, more able to spot lovers who want mirrors, not equals