Billie Eilish is back on top
American singer Billie Eilish’s second studio album, Happier Than Ever, debuted atop the British album chart and is likely to take a similar position next week on the Billboard 200 chart, the top list of popular albums in the United States. There was no doubt that the record would show such results. “Happier Than Ever” is the most talked-about album of the year, even despite the powerful and eccentric advertising campaign Kanye West has launched around his new release.
The 19-year-old Californian singer and songwriter Billie Eilish is fondly referred to in the press as the most successful teenager of the turn of the 2010s and 2020s. Billie Eilish topped the charts after barely releasing her debut album, “When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?” (2019), then earned seven Grammys and recorded a song for the James Bond movie “No Time to Die,” all with the suffix -teen in the word for age. Even before the age of 20, Billie Eilish had met the standard that the vast majority of her peers go to for decades.
Billie Eilish came with her own musical language, fundamentally different from that accepted in the pop mainstream.
Suffice it to say that the album after which she was invited to write music for the Bond movies was recorded in her bedroom. The songs from “When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?” sounded as if a schoolgirl, covered with a blanket over her head, was whispering messages on WhatsApp to someone. At the same time, they were kept on steady bass, and the song “Bad Guy” fit the definition of “danceable.” Not that anyone had ever done that before, but here everything was in the hands of the Interscope label – the specialists made sure that the songs were heard by the whole planet.
No one knows who Billie Eilish was competing with more, the other artists or herself, for the release of Happier Than Ever. Relative to Billie Eilish’s 2019 sample, Billie Eilish 2021 was in a weak position. For all the talent of the singer and her brother, co-writer and co-producer Finneas O’Connell, they would never be “the new big thing” again. And yet in 2021 came a girl named Olivia Rodrigo, whose first and second singles took turns starting at No. 1 on the U.S. chart – something that had never happened to anyone before. Olivia Rodrigo’s specialty is the ability to combine stylistically contrasting parts within one song.
It is approximately the same in the title song of the album “Happier Than Ever”, partially covered in the biographical film “A Slightly Blurred World” (yes, the documentary about Ailish has already been made too). The song starts out as a quiet, slow Latin song, and turns into stadium rock with electric guitars in the second part. Judging by that description, radio stations should stay away from such a song. But Billy Eilish’s status is such that the song is listened to all the same. About the same thing happens in the song “My Future. It starts out as a jazz parlor ballad, but about halfway through, you can dance to it.
When it comes to the album as a whole, Billie Eilish definitely didn’t sing louder, and her trusty whispers got even deeper into the dark electronic arrangements.
That said, the songs haven’t gotten sadder or darker. They certainly became more melodic, and Billy and Finneas’ approach to melodies is the most traditional, from the 20th century, maybe even from the first half of it. If by “tired diva,” we mean Lana Del Rey, then Billie Eilish is a tired diva with new Instagram filters.
“Is there a new ‘Bad Guy’ on the album?” – is a natural, though uncomfortable question for any artist. “Bad Guy” is a hit that comes to most writers once in a career, and audiences want “the same thing” all over again. On the new album, “Oxytocin” serves as a dance-fighting song, with Billy Eilish even singing (or screaming) in a high-pitched voice. The short “swinging” song “Goldwing” is also quite dynamic.
But the album’s centerpiece, “Happier Than Ever,” is not a song at all, but a conversational track called “Not My Responsibility” with a slightly blurry synth in the background. It’s Billie Eilish’s answer to anyone who thinks they know her, and thinks it’s their duty to speak out about her music, her outfits, her body. Billie Eilish reveals that no matter how people react to her expressions of individuality, she always feels watched, and the feeling is excruciating: “If I dress my way, I’m not feminine enough,” says Eilish, “if I let myself loose, then I’m a whore.