Music

Review: Billie Eilish’s Happier Than Ever Is a Thoughtful, Confident Statement of Intent

The songs on Billie Eilish’s Happier Than Ever seamlessly trace the singer’s path to happiness, or something close to it.

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From an academic perspective, happiness is relative, the result of one’s material or emotional needs being met after a period of dissatisfaction. So while the title of Billie Eilish’s Happier Than Ever might seem like the pinnacle of zoomer snark, an impression bolstered by the 19-year-old singer-songwriter staring tearfully into the near distance on the album’s cover, it is, in fact, a sincere—and presumably accurate—evaluation of her state of mind.

Eilish’s debut album, When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?, is populated by dark, brooding bangers and dark, brooding dirges, peppered with only occasional moments of levity, like the tongue-in-cheek “I Wish You Were Gay” and inside jokes between the artist and her brother/producer Finneas. Happier Than Ever is discernably more upbeat, a tone set by the album’s first single, the jazzy “My Future,” which finds Eilish pondering some semblance of self-love in the midst of romantic independence: “I know supposedly I’m lonely now/Know I’m supposed to be unhappy without someone/But aren’t I someone?”


The album also nudges Eilish beyond the trip-hop and trap sounds that dominated her past work, resulting in a more sonically diverse set that allows the singer—whose downbeat vocals have often been compared to Lorde’s—to explore the more textured, melodic aspects of her voice. And when the songs don’t seamlessly segue into one another, they’re thoughtfully sequenced to trace Eilish’s path to happiness—or something close to it.

The title of Happier Than Ever is, in part, a statement of intent. “I’m happier than ever, at least that’s my endeavor/To keep myself together and prioritize my pleasure,” Eilish sings on opening track “Getting Older.” She succeeds at that endeavor on the industrial-pop “Oxytocin,” a reference to a neurotransmitter that, like dopamine, is associated with physical or emotional gratification, and “Billie Bossa Nova,” which presents a more mature, sensual side to her persona.


Of course, Eilish faces the added obstacle of pursuing happiness while under the glare of the spotlight, and fame or its tangential effects on her life are referenced on nearly every song here. “Would you like me to be smaller, weaker, softer, taller?/Would you like me to be quiet?” she asks on “Not My Responsibility,” a spoken-word piece about the public’s objectification and consumption of the female body that originally debuted during Eilish’s 2020 world tour.

The bouncy meter of Finneas’s keyboards on “Getting Older” belies Eilish’s ambivalence about the dulling effect that her career has had on her personal life: “Things I once enjoyed/Just keep me employed now.” And while her primary targets on the song are stalkers, the media, and predatory music execs, she saves her harshest assessment for herself, with frank self-analysis worthy of Alanis Morissette or Fiona Apple: “Can’t shake the feeling that I’m just bad at healing/And maybe that’s the reason every sentence sounds rehearsed/Which is ironic because when I wasn’t honest/I was still bein’ ignored.”


An otherwise innocuous exchange between Eilish and Finneas—“Want me to sing in here?” she asks him on Happier Than Ever’s acoustic closing track, “Male Fantasy”—symbolizes, perhaps unintentionally, Eilish’s struggle to assert her own agency. It’s a rare moment of deferral on an album that sees her repeatedly rejecting the way that her personal and professional contentment is tethered to the men in her life, from “Lost Cause,” a simmering takedown of a former boyfriend, to the guitar-driven title track, which reinforces the notion of happiness’s relativity: “When I’m away from you/I’m happier than ever.” When, on “Therefore I Am,” she re-appropriates French philosopher René Descartes’s famous dictum “Cogito, ergo sum,” she isn’t just trying to prove her existence, but manifesting her own happiness.

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Label: Interscope Release Date: July 30, 2021 Buy: Amazon
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