Most of the little details that made When We All Fall Asleep Where Do We Go were small and vaguely discomfiting. If this album came from anyone else, it would sound like the kind of downtempo sophisti-pop that used to get played in upscale clothing boutiques in the late ’90s.
#When im away from you im happier full
Happier Than Ever is full of acoustic guitars and delicately deployed synths and hushed, murmuring beats. Eilish sings so quietly, and Finneas mics her so closely, that you can hear the spit-bubbles popping in her mouth. The songs are torchy and soft and nervous. I take no pleasure in reporting that Happier Than Ever is a boring record.
But where Eilish and Finneas once sounded giddy and sloppy and inventive and sometimes intentionally off-putting, they mostly come off shell-shocked now. Instead, she went back to the bedroom-pop process of her first record, making the entire thing with her brother Finneas - himself a minor alt-rock star now - co-writing and producing and playing just about everything. She must’ve faced tremendous pressure to make a relatively conventional pop record now that she’s a relatively conventional pop star. Eilish’s sophomore album was a too-big-to-fail endeavor before it even existed. The mere fact that Happier Than Ever exists in its current form stands as some kind of triumph. Instead, Happier Than Ever was fated to be a reactive record, an album about one young woman’s attempts to navigate levels of scrutiny that nobody, least of all a teenager, should ever be expected to handle. When Eilish’s first LP blew up the way it did, it took away any possibility that she could ever make an album like that again. The song doesn’t appear on Eilish’s brand-new sophomore album Happier Than Ever, but it does provide a sort of blueprint for the album. “Everything I Wanted” was specifically about Eilish’s discomfort with all the attention she was getting getting that Grammy must’ve felt like a bitter sort of irony. (The first, Christopher Cross, won his awards two decades before Eilish was born, and his post-Grammys career does not exactly offer Eilish a reliable roadmap.) This year, the Grammys couldn’t stop themselves from continuing to award Eilish, and she seemed actively embarrassed when she took home Record Of The Year for the second year running.Įilish won that second Record Of The Year for “ Everything I Wanted,” the first single she released after coming out with her 2019 debut album When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go. In 2020, Eilish swept the Grammys, becoming only the second artist to win all four major cross-genre categories. A month after she turned 18, the Grammys dropped a heaping pile of statues into Eilish’s lap. It would be one thing if Billie Eilish were merely a youth-culture phenomenon. (On Instagram, Eilish told her impersonators to stop: “You make me look bad… Also soooo disrespectful that you’d go out pretending to be me wearing THIS.”) Last year, a Billie Eilish impersonator was out there getting mobbed. Within a couple of years, she was famous enough that she couldn’t go outside. She was a star before she was old enough to drive. Billie Eilish basically proceeded directly to the second stage without passing go. That stage doesn’t look like any fun at all. There’s also a stage of fame where your accomplishments become their own prison, where you’re constantly awash in the opinions of strangers. You’re young and rich, and everyone is happy to see you every time you go anywhere. There’s a stage of fame that, at least to an outsider, looks fun and exciting. I wouldn’t wish Billie Eilish’s success on my worst enemy.
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