Happier Than Ever: The Premature Decline of Billie Eilish?

Source: Billie Eilish / The Hollywood Reporter

On July 30th, 2021, Billie Eilish released her sophomore album titled Happier Than Ever. As it has been clear since the reveal of the album cover, it introduced a completely new aesthetic from her ambitious debut When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? To distance herself from her first record, Billie is now pushing for a golden palette, as also her new hair color shows.

The announcement of her new album came out as quite a surprise although she had already released two singles the previous year—"my future” and “Therefore I Am.” I personally didn’t see that coming and I don’t think anyone else did either. When We All Fall Asleep, released in 2019, is still going strong to this day, then why spoil your fans with not only a new album but a brand-new visual and conceptual era?

Vogue Cover

For this new project, Billie is showing a more mature and, dare I say, sensual side of herself. The first hint of this came from the photoshoot for the cover of Vogue, where she appears wearing a bustier and showing her curves, which her baggy clothing hid during the When We All Fall Asleep era. This decision might have originated from the backlash she received after a picture of herself in a tank top and shorts started circulating on the web: Twitter user GamesNosh even refers to Billie’s physique as a “mid-30’s wine mom body.”

Perhaps in response to this comment, Billie wanted to show that her body was not a “wine mom body,” but her actual body type, hidden behind her style choices up to that moment. However, keep in mind these are just the speculation of someone who saw the events unfolding in real-time, and I do not know what her real motives might have been.

Regardless, the Vogue cover came out as a shock to some, but it was very clear that a new era was on the horizon for Billie’s public image and art.

Female Empowerment?

This time, Billie had the hard task of replicating the quality of that masterpiece that is When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? If I may define like it, that album is just perfection: mainstream and indie at the same time, aggressive but sweet, morbid but beautiful.

After the release of “Your Power,” which to me sounded like a very weak lead single, it’s perhaps “Lost Cause” that got most people talking. The music video for the song shows Billie and a group of girlfriends having a slumber party in arguably a provocative attitude that some interpreted as sexual tension between the girls. I’d rather specify that “provocative” here has a very loose meaning and perhaps some people wouldn’t see anything sexual in it.

However, some people did, and they accused Billie of queer-baiting, which, according to the Urban Dictionary, is “a marketing technique used to attract queer viewers that involves creating romantic or sexual tension between two same-sex characters but never making it canon or evolving on it.” In this case, Billie might be faking a seductive interaction with her friends to please her lesbian viewers. A further evidence of this is her post captioned “I love girls” to promote the release of the music video.

Whether she’s queer-baiting or not, however, Billie is surely giving out the same vibes that her audience perceived when they saw the Vogue cover—Billie is not a moody teenager covered in layers of baggy clothing anymore, but a young woman.

For many years, Billie was praised for refusing to show her body like 90% of female celebrities do nowadays: by doing so, she forced the world to pay close attention to her music, and although fashion has always been part of her persona as her collaborations with fashion brands like H&M, Urban Outfitter and Bershka show, it was never about her body per se. It was about how her art sounded and looked on herself. She was the literal embodiment of her own music.

Now, in this new era of Happier Than Ever, Billie is putting a much bigger emphasis on her body, just like the 90% of female celebrities I mentioned before, and although there is nothing wrong with that, it surely takes away from Billie’s charm that made her so uniquely popular in the first place. If you want to further explore this idea, check out The Take’s analysis of Billie’s past era, titled Billie Eilish – The Anatomy of 21st Century Angst.

Hit or Miss? Too Early to Say

With an album as strong as When We All Fall Asleep, it is hard for me to review Happier Than Ever without comparing it to its predecessor. Billie’s and Finneas’s new musical effort isn’t disappointing in and of itself, but it is a much calmer, dare I say a much more chill, approach to the style and themes they’re recognized for: topics like love, fame and sadness appear deadened down by these very soft vocals over mostly bossa-nova-sounding arrangements. Theme-wise, Happier Than Ever is centered around the idea of getting old and what it means to Billie, as the opening track suggests.

Of course, there are songs that brought me back to the ancient splendeur of her past era, like “Oxytocin,” the unexpected “GOLDWING,” “Lost Cause”—which, apart from its completely unrelated music video, is a very catchy song—“Therefore I Am”—released before Billie’s makeover—and especially the title track, which has that insane explosion of instruments at the end. They are proof of the fact that Billie and Finneas are still a killer duo capable of producing one viral hit after the other.

If we look at the timeline, the relatively short time between the aftermath of When We All Fall Asleep and the anticipation for her new record might have worked against her favor, as to me it felt like she didn’t have enough time to fully develop a new style, sound, and aesthetic. That’s what Happier Than Ever feels like: fun to listen to, but very forgettable, as if they gave more attention to certain songs and not others, which inevitably ended up sounding like “filler tracks.”

From the announcement of the leading single “You Should See Me in a Crown” to the actual release of When We All Fall Asleep, Billie and her marketing team had eight months not only to increase the hype among fans, but also develop a coherent narrative around the whole project. Instead, Happier Than Ever was announced in May 2021, only three months before its release. Consider also that Billie has been in the public eye a lot for the past three years, and not taking breaks in-between projects might have been her biggest mistake.

That might be the reason why some fans like myself didn’t find the new album as convincing as the first one: it came out too soon, at a time when the songs featured in When We All Fall Asleep are still pretty much loved by everyone. I wouldn’t be surprised if her new music style and look grew on me over time, but for the time being, I’m still waiting for that moment to happen, if it ever does.

Conclusively, Happier Than Ever is, quite frankly, an album that nobody, except Billie’s stans, needed, wanted, or even asked for. It’s an unnecessary follow-up to a project that really spoke to its listeners, a record that captured the momentum of Billie’s rise to popularity and her consequent immense success that made her the Kurt Cobain of the new generations of teenagers, whose anthem consists in one word and one word only.

Duh.