Billie Eilish's Second Album Is Full with Criticism for Her Critics

Billie Eilish's Second Album Is Full with Criticism for Her Critics

She's Happier Than Ever, yet her pleasure seems more solemn than joyful.

Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images

Two years might feel like an eternity when you're 19 years old. Later on, it may seem to pass in a flash. This is why, in more normal circumstances, many fans may have been taken aback by Billie Eilish's new album Happier Than Ever, which seems like a departure from her enormously popular full-length debut, 2019's When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? In the meantime, humanity's collective rhythm has fallen into a Covid-19-shaped vortex, and what happened two years ago now appears impossible to even individuals Eilish's senior. Many of us are feeling more somber, rattled, and lacking in swagger, and with a few noteworthy exceptions, Eilish sounds this way here.

Happier Than Ever has a twofold meaning: If you were hoping for a more cheerful, carefree album from the 21st-century pop goth famed for her nightmare-inducing lyrics, this isn't it. The mood is slower and more solemn than her signature songs. However, the album depicts a mature artist overcoming barriers to attain fulfillment, expressing her right to self-possession in ways that make enjoyment more sustainable in the long run.

Whereas her debut featured Eilish knifing the nasties beneath the bed in the dark as stand-ins for more significant psychological monsters, her major foils on her sophomore record are stalkers, online haters, awful lovers, body shamers, power abusers, and other real-world bad men. It's difficult not to pine for the younger Eilish's imaginative horror-movie world-building, which seemed like such a surprising, freeing new presence in mainstream music in 2019—aided by her sister co-writer and producer Finneas's knack with quirky sound effects. Paired with Lil Nas X's breakout single "Old Town Road" the same year,  Eilish seemed to be a harbinger of a further-out, cliché-crushing pop-generational turn.

However, early celebrity is a potent influence, especially in the age of social media scrutiny. Eilish and Nas X (whose own first full-length Montero is due out any day now) have unavoidably devoted most of their efforts to preserve their psychological and personal integrity in the face of severe scrutiny that few people can even comprehend. In interviews, Eilish has stated that flattery can be just as perplexing and harmful as criticism. Consider how her preference for loose, form-fitting clothes was juxtaposed with the alleged sexual excesses of other female music stars: It not only turned her into a reluctant participant in slut-shaming. However, she suggested that if she ever wore more revealingly, she would be making a mistake. That's why, in the lead-up to this album's release, Eilish ditched her signature dyed-green hairstyle—which had become her own kind of identity-constricting trap—for bombshell-blonde, and had herself shot in sumptuous lingerie for the cover of Vogue. This, of course, resulted in yet another reaction.

There are phrases scattered throughout Happier Than Ever that poke fun at the internet peanut gallery's arrogance in claiming to know what's going on in life they only know about from rumors, supposition, and ancient online breadcrumbs. But it's apparent that the attention on her physique has had the most impact on Eilish. The album revolves around a mid-album spoken-word monologue, "Not My Responsibility," which she debuted during her brief globe tour in 2020, with a short clip showing Eilish progressively shedding clothes and drowning into a pool of tar. “You have views about my opinions, about my music, about my clothing, about my body,” she says emphatically. “However, I constantly have the impression that you are keeping an eye on me.” That song inspires everything that comes before and after it, including "Halley's Comet," the album's sole true love song, a lovely tune about being seduced by desire but held back by risk, and "OverHeated." a less musically interesting statement in defiance of a traumatic paparazzi incident. Eilish so far hasn’t gone through what someone like Britney Spears did, thanks to a trustworthy circle of family and well-vetted business associates, but even then she can come shockingly close.

A second album about the rigors of celebrity is an industry standard, and it frequently marks the point at which an artist loses touch with the thread that drew them to an audience in the first place, only seeing the world through a scrim of travel and publicists. I began to worry about that in the album's lovely opening salvo, "Getting Older," when Eilish sang in the chorus, "Things I once enjoyed/ Just keep me employed now." I was reminded of a scene in The World's a Little Blurry, a documentary released earlier this year, in which Eilish informed her family she didn't want to create another record. Still, towards the end of the first song, she gives another reason to keep going: "I've suffered some trauma, did things I didn’t wanna/ Was too afraid to tell ya, but now, I think it’s time.”

And it is in its greatest moments that Happier Than Ever transcends the second-album curse: It is founded on a resolve to testify beyond the Eilish of 2019, but still retaining enough privacy to demand her autonomy. It juggles the fame album, a post-#MeToo feminist-protest album, the breakup album (the songs return to overlapping complaints about a relationship situation, recalling her peer Olivia Rodrigo's more single-minded debut Sour, from May), and just enough familiar Billie-and-Finneas sardonicism not to be an endless slog.

It could have been shorter—a song like "Billie's Bossa Nova," about a fantasy clandestine hotel rendezvous, feels like a Finneas-led musical exercise, whereas "Everybody Dies" is a reach for a bigger idea, a return to some When We All Fall Asleep preoccupations, that is a welcome change of pace but falls short of profundity. However, the way Eilish weaves themes from song to song and within songs connects relative obscurity with her extraordinary life experiences as a very-young-adult celebrity: the public component of growing up today, regardless of fame, when an Instagram post or an out-of-date tweet can rattle any young person's reputation or become bullying bait.

They may not have to deal with articles and interviews, which she cites in numerous songs as something she dislikes but wants her intimates to be aware of, but regular people might have similar feelings about their internet connections.

This complication is compounded by the musical shift she and Finneas have made. They use less of the second-hand, homespun-trap that defined When We All Fall Asleep and more jazzy torch-song textures that Eilish attributes to the influence of 1950s-'60s vocalist Julie London. The tracks frequently begin with vintage quiet and then flip to rhythms midway through, like on the strummy title track or the floatingly ethereal “My Future.” In the case of “Happier Than Ever,” that escalates to the point of Eilish ultimately shouting, “Just fucking leave me alone”—which may be the unspoken subtext of every torch song ever.

So, too, might the inverted version that appears at the conclusion of the album's last track, "Male Fantasy," when Eilish sings, "I know I should, but I couldn't hate you." That song begins daringly, with Eilish diverting herself in a bad time by viewing porn and wondering how the male gaze molds false depictions of women's sex satisfaction—but by the end, it's about an equally distracting dream about a guy, and how he may have been nicer to her.

The album's most thematically expansive and memorable track is probably the single "Your Power," on which Finneas uses 1970s acoustic-singer-songwriter textures to gently couch some of Eilish's most confrontational lyrics about male power abuse, touching briefly on personal experience while weaving in stories she's heard from or about others to make a more universal point. The musical arrangement, as well as lyrics like "She was sleeping in your clothes/ But now she's got to go to class" and "You claim you didn't know/ You believed she was your age," are evocative of the effect of Phoebe Bridgers' song about her brief romance with Ryan Adams: “You said when you met me you were bored/ And you were in a band when I was born.”

There are a couple tunes here that are more focused on becoming bops. The sarcastic-yet-Socratic track "Therefore I Am," from last summer, is represented, as is the wonderful pandemic-minded video of Eilish scarfing goodies in an empty food court. So is the current "NDA," which winks at under-the-radar relationships that must sign non-disclosure agreements and summarises a number of the album's other tracks in the second stanza. “I Didn't Change My Number” is a hymn for fully-justified hosters worldwide, with some typical Finneas-and-Billie musical humor hidden in loops of scary dog barks. And “Oxytocin” is similar to “Bad Guy” in terms of keyboard and vocal stylizations, but with a lot more mature, mature feel. Eilish offers herself simultaneously as the pursuer and the pursued in a fully consenting-aged pleasure pretzel, with a sensuality that is novel to her.

Happier Than Ever needs those sparkling moments to keep fans engaged throughout the balladry and quiet, but it uses them sparingly. Then there's the beginning of "Goldwing," which begins with layered Eilish voices performing a verse from early-20th-century English composer Gustav Holst's orchestral transliteration of the Hindu Rig Veda before ascending to a whole other Kate Bush-fusion-hemispheric level of transcendence—something I would never have guessed she'd include in a century. It reminds me that, as much as Billie Eilish's second album is important—as a cultural phenomenon, a statement of Gen-Z womanhood, a possible intervention in pop music's future direction—both Billie and Finneas are artists who, based on their short history, could do practically anything in the future. If the future allows them to.