Has Billie Eilish already fallen out of love with the music industry? Despite the title, on Happier Than Ever, her second full-length album, the 19-year-old Californian singer airs her many grievances at a business that has shamed and criticised her since she entered it as a child. “Things I once enjoyed/Just keep me employed now,” she sings in a quiet mumble over sparse, harpsichord-like keys on album opener “Getting Older”. It’s a notably vulnerable start – even from an artist known, and celebrated, for speaking her mind.
Eilish was 17 years old when she released her debut, When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?. With it, she became the first artist born in the 2000s to have a number one album in the US, and the youngest female solo artist ever to have a number one album in the UK. Writing alongside her producer brother Finneas, Eilish makes a very millennial brand of pop: open-minded and chameleon-like, morphing from pure pop to electro-pop, and then to hip-hop, with ease. It’s in these bright-eyed, thrill-seeking switches – from the breathy, synth-heavy “Oxytocin”, straight into the angelic choral opening of “Goldwing” – that Happier Than Ever is most arresting. And it’s these moments of musical intrigue that you know keep Eilish writing too.
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