Happier than Ever

With this collection, she proves that she was not just a shot in the dark or a blaze lighting up the sky for only a moment.

‘Happier Than Ever’ fully establishes Billie Eilish as one of her generation’s most significant pop artists – and, better still, does so without repeating a single trick from the debut that turned her life upside down.

It’s an album that feels more intimate than the first one, and the first one was pretty intimate. ... It’s a fabulous headphones record.

Delivering on the promise of her industry-shaking debut with confidence and grace, Happier Than Ever has the markings of a big career moment, one that signals artistic growth and hints at even more greatness to come.

The results are daring, but she’s succeeded in making the best pop album of 2021, thus far.

Billie Eilish’s second album expands upon everything that worked the last time and pushes it in new directions, a creative muse restless and bold in its ambition. It may not always land, but this is a terrific release that proves Eilish’s staying power, demonstrating she’s more than up to the task of delivering on the promise of her debut.

The hooks are less immediately earworm-y than stomping When We All Fall anthems like "Bad Guy" or "Bury a Friend"; only rarely do the BPMs bump up high enough to transfer to the dance floor. Mostly, the beats are there to frame Eilish's singular voice: a smoky, silvery instrument that swoops and dips between vulnerability and bravado, jazz-bar bossa nova and confessional Gen Z poetry.

“Your Power” is the slowest-and-lowest moment on “Happier Than Ever,” but as a whole the album is softer, quieter, more languid than Eilish’s trap-inflected debut. ... The dreamy-jazzy mode suits her singing, which has never sounded better than it does throughout “Happier Than Ever.”

It's not your typical upbeat pop album — instead, it's more reflective and subdued. Through it all, it stays true to the young artist that took over pop music in only a few short years.

Perhaps the most ambitious moment on the album is its warped title track which goes from a whisper to a scream when Eilish’s crystalline vocals burst from power ballad to an explosive Metallica-esque electric guitar anthem. Still, it’s the unwavering vulnerability of Eilish’s songwriting that makes Happier Than Ever most impressive.

Billie Eilish continues to rise to the occasion on Happier Than Ever, staring down critics, naysayers and whatever the future holds while carrying self-love and compassion in her back pocket.

Happier Than Ever is a record of many layers and nuances. It is primarily a deep dive into the dark side of overnight celebrity and the internet’s industrial-scale objectification of young stars. But the project is also is a study in loneliness and a baroque, at times almost gothic, picking apart of adolescent melancholia. It’s Lindsay Anderson directing an episode of HBO’s Euphoria. Or Edward Gorey illustrating Judy Blume.

We relate because we root for her, because we listen with affection and identification. We’d all rather see her in a crown, running this nothing town. But the most striking thing about Happier Than Ever is that she’s refusing to coddle her audience, refusing to protect us from her darkest moments. It’s a high-risk move.

The rest of Happier Than Ever tells a richly nuanced story about how human beings intersect.

An album that consolidates and enhances Billie Eilish’s reputation as one of the stellar figures of her generation.

Patiently moving into a new era, ‘Happier Than Ever’ is shrouded in a transformative darkness.

Happier Than Ever is full of things most of us don’t have to deal with – NDAs, interviews, paparazzi – and yet Eilish weaves them around universal woes, with such a knack for sharp, insightful lyrics that it never comes across like her diamond shoes are too tight.

The 16-song set flows beautifully, carrying listeners on an emotional journey in which surprising musical twists and glittering barbs of lyrical empowerment cast optimistic light on a long dark night of Billie’s tortured soul.

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.

The melodies and vocals are uniformly great; writing about the pressure of fame in a way that elicits a response other than a yawn is an extremely tough trick to pull off, and Happier Than Ever does it with aplomb.

Some of Happier Than Ever’s quieter tracks drag—“Everybody Dies”’s dreary grasps at existentialism barely leave an impression. That said, as the beat change on “My Future” shows, Happier Than Ever’s best songs are the ones where Eilish and Finneas allow one small idea to mutate into two or three bigger ones.

So, whilst it may not boast songs that stick with you for months in the way that Eilish’s first does, Happier Than Ever feels like a project that will age more gracefully and, in years to come, it may even come to eclipse that which came before it.

Aesthetically, it may be polarizing compared to the hit factory that was her debut, but Happier Than Ever stands on its own as a powerfully flawed, overstuffed, but meaningful exploration of what it’s like to live as both a teenager and a superstar in ways that none before her felt comfortable saying.

During its slower stretches, “Happier Than Ever” languishes. ... The risks start to pay off, though, on the album’s strong closing stretch, beginning as the warping “NDA” segues into the brash posturing of “Therefore I Am,” one of several lukewarm singles that benefits from the surrounding context of the album. ... Eilish remains an inveterate rebel. “Happier Than Ever,” though, exposes both the strengths and the limitations of her preferred mode of subversion.

At roughly 56 minutes in length, Happier loses traction occasionally and would’ve benefited from further vetting, particularly mid-sequence.