Go away! Then I'll let you get very close: This is what Billie Eilish's second album "Happier Than Ever" sounds like.

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Billie Eilish at her album presentation in Los Angeles: Between paparazzi and cuddly hormones

Photo:

Matt Winkelmeyer / Getty Images / Spotify

In the middle of the album there is a kind of disclaimer. According to the motto »Keep listening at your own risk«. However, Billie Eilish is not just about listening to her music, but in the hauntingly spoken lines of the ninth song "My Responsibility" she turns against the decisive judgments that her opponents, the media, but also her fans spread about her. If she lived according to it, she would never be able to move again, she sighs and asks, translated analogously: »Is my value based on your perception? Or am I not responsible for your views at all? "

Billie Eilish's second album comes at a complicated point in her career. With her debut "When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?" The then 17-year-old singer got off to an incredible start in 2019, topped the charts and won all the main Grammy categories. But with the success came the haters, the bubble of fame, the flatterers. But Billie Eilish's popularity, at least among the young audience, worked largely through a sense of identification. Can it still work if Eilish continues to sing about her life, but this life has become so different from that of her fans?

Billie Eilish also allowed an unusual level of closeness as a pop star. She underscored this with the documentary film "The World's A Little Blurry" - you saw her writing songs and on a world tour, but also fighting a relationship and taking a driver's license test. We think we know what's going on with her. And she knows that we believe that - and knows what we don't know. Several songs on the new album are about preserving this space of the inaccessible.

It starts with the opening inventory, “Getting Older,” in which Eilish sings about the stranger who is always waiting at the door. In the song "Overheated" she describes the onslaught of the paparazzi in her life and wonders what news value the fact that she looks just like everyone else has. And the side effects of fame mingle even in the love songs: This is about using false names at the hotel reception and avoiding lively lobbies, where a lover is supposed to sign a non-disclosure agreement.

But the connection between the celebrity world of the pop phenomenon and the world of the listener succeeds because the audience, who of course move on social media, knows very well what it means to be judged on the basis of images and statements - albeit on a smaller scale.

That way, the identification remains and Billie Eilish can take the next step.

On the image side, which is always important in pop, this is a reference to classic American entertainment icons - Billie Eilish already showed herself blanched on the British »Vogue«, on the album cover she throws herself in a shoulder-free pose.

In interviews she talked

about hearing

Julie London's "Cry Me A River" or Frank Sinatra, and this reference to the classic

torch songs

can be heard on some ballads: "Billie Bossa Nova" is an amazingly light-footed song about love, sex and secrets, and the wonderful consolation song »Everybody Dies« dares to tackle the art of packing existential questions about eternal life into lines of songs that allow childlike amazement. Compared to

Lana Del Rey,

who was also inspired by the

Great American Songbook

, Billie Eilish never delves into allusive details and therefore does not sound retro-blissful.

On the contrary, the music that Eilish once again wrote with her brother and producer Finneas succeeds in finding the right mix of timeless and time-typical: Sometimes "Your Power" begins with a classical acoustic guitar theme, then suddenly it hits in "NDA" Autotune chorus too. While overly contemplative moods were interrupted by sometimes garish beats on the debut album, the successor remains mostly quiet. Billie Eilish does not jeopardize her reputation as an ASMR icon lightly, there are passages of the most wonderful whisper in headphones, but her singing is even more varied than before, sometimes distorted, sometimes doubled, occasionally really big croons.

That leaves the title of the album - »Happier Than Ever«.

He appears twice in the songs.

At the beginning, in “Getting Older”, it is more of a challenge to yourself - a kind of personal version of the “pursuit of happiness” from the American Declaration of Independence: “I'm happier than ever, at least that's my endeavor, to keep myself together and prioritize my pleasure «.

In this somewhat awkward way, she undertakes to maintain sanity - even if it can be difficult under the circumstances described.

Then Billie Eilish lets us get very close again in several pieces, she sings about the "cuddle hormone" oxytocin, about a sleepless love ("Halley's Comet"), about the knowledge that you have to let go of a relationship ("Lost Cause").

The penultimate piece on the album is also called "Happier than ever", it is the clear climax: First of all, it becomes very clear to the delicate acoustic guitar: "When I'm away from you, I'm happier than ever".

But from verse to verse, the separation song dispels any impression of a harmonious ending - the ex becomes a stalker, the sound ominous, "just fuckin 'leave me alone", Eilish implores.

There may still be some (and some) in the way of the pursuit of happiness - but Billie Eilish won't let that stop her, she makes that clear on this album.

The difficult second album?

"Happier Than Ever" is proof that Billie Eilish can still achieve a lot as a singer and still has a lot to say as a songwriter.