Billie Eilish: Happier Than Ever review – inside pop stardom’s heart of darkness

“I’m getting older,” sings Billie Eilish, who’s 19, on Happier Than Ever’s opening track. “I’ve got more on my shoulders”, she adds, which is certainly true. Her debut album When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? wasn’t just a huge global hit, but an album that significantly altered mainstream pop music. Two years on, streaming services are clotted with bedroom-bound, teenage singer-songwriters dolefully depicting their lives: anticipation for what the genuine article does next is understandably running very high.

When We All Fall Asleep … was an album that turned universal teenage traumas – romance, hedonism, friendship groups – into knowingly lurid horror-comic fantasies, in which tongues were stapled, friends buried, hearses slept in and marble walls spattered with blood. That playfulness is less evident on its successor. It flickers occasionally, as on Overheated’s exploration of stardom in the era of social media, complete with death threats (“You wanna kill me? You wanna hurt me?” she mumbles, before giggling: “Stop being flirty”) or on NDA, where the “pretty boy” she entices home is required to sign the titular legal agreement before he leaves. But the overall tone is noticeably more sombre.

Your Power and Getting Older both deal with sexual coercion – the former explicitly, the latter more obliquely – but the album’s primary topic is fame and its negative impact on the person at the eye of the storm: stalkers lurk, relationships are ruined, privacy is invaded, an inability to shut off the babble of public opinion about every aspect of your personal life plays havoc with your mental health. The subject even seeps into the album’s love songs: on the title track, Eilish wonders if the object of her affections has read her interviews and panics about them revealing all on the internet; My Future struggles to weigh up a romance against the progress of her career.

Related: Billie Eilish: Your Power review – chilling ballad seeps under your skin

The music follows suit. If its sonic template is broadly similar to that of its predecessor – vocals that veer from mumbling and whispering to jazz-inflected singing but never lose a sense of intimacy; electronics evidently mixed to be listened to on headphones; the occasional shading of guitar or piano – its sound feels more subdued, less flashy. There are lots of clever production touches – the backing of Goldwing loops its a capella intro, a kind of lush, multi-tracked, easy listening reading of a verse from Hindu text the Rig Veda, in a way that recalls a broadband connection glitching – and a couple of moments where it decisively shifts away from Eilish’s previous work, with mixed results: the self-explanatory Billie Bossa Nova feels like a jokey pastiche, but Oxytocin’s techno pulse, bursts of atonal synth and vocal that more or less dispenses with melody is really gripping. But the closest it comes to the sonic firework display of Bury a Friend is the title track, which gradually builds from muffled, lo-fi acoustic ballad into an epic finale, multi-tracked vocals over drums and guitars drenched in a peculiar digital form of distortion that’s discomfiting and alienating rather than warm and familiar.

Listening to a pop star complaining about being a pop star is usually enervating. It says something about Eilish’s skill as a songwriter that, in her hands, the topic feels genuinely affecting. It clearly doesn’t sound anything like Black Sabbath or Nirvana, but there are moments when, spiritually at least, Happier Than Ever feels like a 21st-century pop equivalent of the former’s Sabotage or the latter’s In Utero, two albums that also succeeded in a painting a compellingly bleak but empathetic picture of stardom. There’s something very realistic about the way the righteous anger of both spoken word piece Not My Responsibility and Overheated – “Is it news? News to who?” – doesn’t quite mask the hurt of being judged “for looking just like the rest of you”, or the way the lyrics of Getting Older thrash around, jumping from gratitude for her success to horror at the intensity of adulation and the weight of expectation Eilish has attracted. You listen to it and think: yeah, I’d probably feel like that if I were her.

It’s worth noting that the songs thus far released from Happier Than Ever have received a response muted enough for the singer to respond (“eat my dust,” she wrote on TikTok, “my tits are bigger than yours”). Perhaps that’s inevitable, given the music she’s made. It’s less obviously ear-grabbing and immediate than its predecessor, with lyrics that move away from directly reflecting the lives of her teenage fans: there’s not much point in pretending you’re still just like them when you’ve sold millions, sung a Bond theme and appeared on the cover of Vogue dressed in a custom-made Gucci corset.

But the fact that it’s a lower-key album than her debut shouldn’t distract from Happier Than Ever’s quality. 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. And listening to its grimmer lyrical moments, you wonder if an album that dials down her celebrity slightly would be such a bad thing if Billie Eilish is in it for the long haul, which Happier Than Ever strongly suggests she is.

This week Alexis listened to

Shibashi – All The Lights (ft Aoife Whenyoung)
A finely crafted dance-pop nugget, All the Lights strikes the perfect balance between melancholy and euphoria.