Billie Eilish has questioned her second album, 'Happier than Ever', during an interview with Zane Lowe on Apple Music. The artist is promoting her new album, 'HIT ME HARD AND SOFT', our Album of the Week. Therefore, it is logical that she, like all artists, constructs the story that in this work, now she has indeed found herself. Although that takes away some previous work.
He said about 'Happier than Ever', talking about how he wrote it with Finneas: “We were two people who had been told the most beautiful things imaginable and we sat down to make these songs. I remember we would sit down and say 'we're so good…' We'd work on these songs for a day and say 'that's it.'”
He adds: “we didn't put too much into the album. That's why there are 16 songs. Nobody needs that many songs. Besides coming from that place of “we're so good, this sounds so good,” at least for me, it meant not knowing who he really was. And 'HIT ME HARD AND SOFT' is almost the reverse of that. It's more like “I don't know if what we're doing is good at all. It may be terrible. And now when I think about it, I say to myself: 'yes, I feel comfortable with myself.'”
Of course, 'HIT ME HARD AND SOFT' represents Billie Eilish's sexual discovery. 'LUNCH' is the first song she dedicates to a girl, and it sounds explicit. But it is also true that the artist is being too hard on herself. Perhaps affected, even if unconsciously, by the fact that her debut won the Grammy for Album of the Year, and 'Happier than Ever' lost to something as innocuous as Jon Batiste's 'We Are'.
'Happier than Ever' opened with a composition called 'Getting Older', published when the artist was not yet 20 years old. It was a varied album, beyond the fun of calling a song 'Billie Bossa Nova', and somewhat scattered. Jordi Bardají wrote in his review, rated 7.9 out of 10, that in the long song “Billie tries to unify songs that are quite different from each other. Sometimes she gets it and sometimes she doesn't. Also, about the 16 songs, that with “its adventurous productions it is clear that Billie Eilish's second album is made to silence mouths, but it is still not completely complete because its sequence is too long.”
The new album, on the contrary, has only 10 cuts, clear, distinguishable, and concise. It is evident that the change has suited him very well and the numbers are beginning to support him. As the days go by, it seems that to the good reception of 'LUNCH', we must add that of 'CHIHIRO' and 'BIRDS OF A FEATHER'. But what's more, 'BLUE' and 'L'AMOUR DE MA VIE' are gaining more and more popularity. So yeah, this album is definitely better than the second one.
It's okay to have judgment, move forward and not admit past mistakes, but you shouldn't detract from what was done better than OK at the time. Especially the final stretch of 'Happier than Ever' was overwhelming, from the minimalism of 'Your Power' to the high towards the middle of 'Happier than Ever' – which Olivia Rodrigo must have liked so much -, passing through the electronics of 'NDA' -very important for the development of the new album- or that 'Therefore I Am' unspeakable video.
It would be a shame if all these songs disappeared from his setlist. In the fall, when her tour begins – which does not arrive in Spain until June 2025 -, we will find out which compositions from that second album Billie has in highest esteem.
Charging …
