Album Review: Billie Eilish – Happier Than Ever

Happier Than Ever is the second studio album by American singer and songwriter Billie Eilish. Released on July 30, 2021 by Darkroom and Interscope Records, Eilish co-wrote the album with Finneas O’Connell, her brother, co-producer and overall musical wizard.

With her latest album, Eilish flows between pop, electro-pop, country, soul, lo-fi trip-hop, techno, still maintaining the signature elements of her sound while switching the narrative of the album to a much more pointed and directed reflection on the world and her place in it.

The album opens with the Getting Older, delicate, hollow synths providing minimal backing to Eilish’s opening lyrics delivered in her classically restrained melancholy:

I’m gettin’ older, I think I’m agin’ well
I wish someone had told me I’d be doin’ this by myself
 
Last week, I realized that I crave pity
When I re-tell a story, I make everything sound worse
 
Things I once enjoyed (ah-ah)
Just keep me employed now
Things I’m longing for
Some day, I’ll be bored of
It’s so weird
That we care so much until we don’t

It’s a great snapshot of the album and its content as a whole; at 16 tracks, Happier Than Ever has a lot to say, largely focussing on the disillusion of achieving success, witnessing the bitter darkness in other human beings, the pains of naivety and broken trust, and there’s a consistent thread of being viewed as supernatural but treated as less-than-human.

I often think about Billie Eilish playing a small gig at The Tuning Fork in 2018, then blowing up and, just a year later, playing a gig at Vector Arena which sold out in less than a minute and had one of the most jaw-droppingly obsessed crowds I’ve ever witnessed.

That sudden jolt from good success to the highest point of super-stardom at such a young age, and the messiah-like praise that was given to the unique sound, lyrics, musical excellence, and then also to Billie herself, connecting every song as a deeply insightful glimpse beyond the veil of her macabre musical genius.

It’s the kind of personal praise transformed into personal responsibility that nobody should have to shoulder, and Billie is just a teenager. An intelligent, hyper-aware teenager? Sure. A brilliant master of expressing her unique perspective for life through lyrics and combining this with a tragically seductive voice? That too.

But a teenager all the same and one who, in 2018, appeared to be a humble, beautifully expressive young musician, a little introverted and quirky in an authentically endearing way, but genuinely involved entirely with her music and the simple joy of expressing it in the unique way she was evolving toward.

The burdens, assumed responsibilities, and weight of the world hit everyone in their own ways and in varying intensities and frequencies. But as a teenager, it’s so weird to have to think about doing this, and this is pretty much exactly what Billie has to say in this mega album of lyrical overwhelming.

The fourth track, my future, is a soulful, R&B number about self-discovery, Oxytocin is a SexyBack sweat-groove about our biological love hormone, put through an electro-funk filter, ​​and the spoken-word interlude, Not My Responsibility sees Eilish unpack the absurdity of conformity around her position; continually critiqued from afar, judged and dissected until, again, she resembles less of a human being than an alien.

The album covers almost every just-below-the-surface topic in popular societal discussion, and it’s the type of music I’d love to listen to on a rainy day while I’m feeling neglected and unloved and alone. I don’t mean that in an emotional, mopey, unproductive way, but the album is just an endless stream of melodies and lyrics which both inspire introspective discussion and examination of ourselves.

It is – beautifully – the exact same, purely observational lyrical and musical lens of Eilish, it’s just that now the world isn’t as fun or mischievous, and it’s become a lot uglier a lot faster than we expected. It’s bold and graceful, and largely unapologetic in what it has to say, but it’s ultimately still the passionately flawed expression of someone needing to continue growing – where their talent for musical expression has already eclipsed their personal life experience.

This seems to be another sentiment expressed across the album, where the deviation from her previous template of deep bass drops in sombre, slow melodies gives some of the best songs on the album. NDA is absolutely brilliant in how strangely appealing it is, with its  Mario Haunted House backing mixed with 80s Drive synths and then mixing in heavy, heavy vibes of K Flay’s Giver in the closing.

This bleeds into Therefore I Am, another absolute highlight of the album’s second, more experimental sound; a groovy, upbeat, sick-of-your-bullshit song. As the album nears its end, it feels like Billie embracing a little of that nostalgic, playful mischief instead of trying to make sense of the world and the problems of other people.

And this is where I see those moments of genius. A young genius who requires time and privacy and respect to grow further and develop into someone who could change the world.

And it’s in the opening half of Happier Than Ever that, for the first time, the image of a Back To Black-era Amy Winehouse appears in my head, another voice and unique soul that shared a similar start. The only jarring point on the album is the final track, Male Fantasy, which feels misplaced, like someone adding another detail and comment to a story that has already been told to completion.

The message Billie gives with the album is to “take what you want from it” which is a fairly typical thing to hear from musicians, but feels genuine from Eilish less in the sense that it’s for us, but not about us at all. She knows what the songs mean to her, and she listens to the album from start to finish in a certain way to take that.

When I reviewed her first album, I was delighted by the number of pop-culture references littered throughout the lyrics and narratives, song titles, and little pockets of sound.

In this latest album, it’s the same expression of absorbing everything around her, it’s the same beautifully macabre, unique and hawk-like view on the world, just that it’s not within the previously insulated, controllable world anymore.

Now she’s got everyone else’s problems to deal with as well, and it’s confusing, exhausting, and filled with conflict; perfect if it can be transformed into creative fuel from a distance, and devastating if it ever becomes an intimate creative sustenance.

While Happier Than Ever is an album clearly satisfied with what it both is and isn’t, it also touches on a thread of hesitation; that feeling of reclusive withdrawing from the world. Eilish is a little older, a little warier, and still just as observant as ever, holding on to the fragments of her past while still figuring things out, and realising that, if nothing else, that’s a responsibility she has to shoulder between the madness of superstardom.

Happier Than Ever: Released July 30, 2021, by Darkroom and Interscope Records.

Oxford Lamoureaux

Tracklist

Getting Older
I Didn’t Change My Number
Billie Bossa Nova
my future
Oxytocin
GOLDWING
Lost Cause
Halley’s Comet
Not My Responsibility
OverHeated
Everybody Dies
Your Power
NDA
Therefore I Am
Happier Than Ever
Male Fantasy