The Anxious Love Songs of Billie Eilish

Earlier this 12 months, the singer and songwriter Billie Eilish, who’s twenty-two, turned the youngest two-time Oscar winner in historical past, accumulating the Greatest Authentic Music award for “What Was I Made For?,” a fragile existential ballad that she co-wrote for the movie “Barbie.” (She additionally received in 2022, for “No Time to Die,” a moody and portentous Bond theme.) By the way, Eilish can also be the youngest individual ever to have a clear sweep of all 4 of the principle Grammy classes (Greatest New Artist, File of the 12 months, Music of the 12 months, and Album of the 12 months), which she achieved in 2020, for her début LP, “When We All Fall Asleep, The place Do We Go?” At that 12 months’s ceremony, moments earlier than Album of the 12 months was introduced, Eilish could be seen mouthing, “Please don’t be me”; onstage, standing alongside her brother Finneas O’Connell, who can also be her co-writer and producer, she appeared bewildered, if not mortified. “We wrote an album about despair, and suicidal ideas, and local weather change,” O’Connell instructed the group. “We get up right here confused and grateful.” It’s each heartening and barely mystifying that Eilish, who writes sombre, idiosyncratic, goth-tinged electro-pop about her loneliness and tedium, has change into such a lodestone for business accolades. “Man am I the best / God I hate it,” Eilish sings on “The Best,” a forlorn, walloping track from her compact however highly effective new album, “Hit Me Onerous and Mushy,” which was simply launched.

Eilish is understood for taking her time in a track, typically crawling by means of a melody as if it have been a bowl of molasses, and she or he usually chooses to sing in a whisper, letting a notice hold within the air earlier than it dissipates completely. Her vocal type jogs my memory of an evanescing cloud of smoke after somebody blows out a cluster of birthday candles—stunning, fleeting, a bit bit haunted. But, on “The Best,” Eilish belts and bellows. “I waited / And waited,” she wails, her voice getting greater and larger. It’s uncommon to search out Eilish in bloodletting mode, however fury and loudness go well with her, too. Lyrically, a lot of “Hit Me Onerous and Mushy” is about wanting a relationship however failing, in some elementary and inescapable method, to maintain closeness with one other individual. It’s an attention-grabbing downside: needing one thing, but in addition realizing you’re incapable of getting it. The twists and turns of Eilish’s emotional journey are mirrored and amplified by O’Connell’s manufacturing; these songs are vulnerable to sudden adjustments and reinventions, ups and downs. Quicker, slower, shut, far, right here, gone. “L’Amour de Ma Vie,” a brand new track a couple of soured relationship—“You have been so mediocre,” Eilish sings—shifts from a lovelorn, jazz-inflected torch track right into a pulsing membership banger, chilly and threatening. In much less assured arms, that transformation could be disorienting, however Eilish and O’Connell are masterly at discovering the connective tissue between disparate emotions and sounds. Why can’t a love track be mild and aggressive, grounded and spectral? Isn’t love?

From the beginning of her profession, Eilish has by no means been notably snug with celeb, and at occasions she has appeared viscerally repelled by it; the anxiousness and paranoia introduced on by international fame are one other theme right here, and are maybe straight liable for Eilish’s romantic angst. On “Skinny,” the craving ballad that opens the album, she displays on coming of age beneath the scrutiny of strangers. “Folks say I look joyful / Simply because I received skinny / However the outdated me remains to be me and possibly the true me / And I believe she’s fairly,” Eilish sings, her voice feathery and resigned. (“The Web is hungry for the meanest sort of humorous / And anyone’s gotta feed it,” she factors out.) “Skinny” is a beautiful track, wounded and fragile, with a whiff of Lilith Truthful folksiness. It ends with a mournful string determine by the Attacca Quartet, the one different musicians featured on the album in addition to Eilish, O’Connell, and Eilish’s tour drummer, Andrew Marshall.

Eilish writes usually about management, an concept that manifests in photographs of closed doorways and lyrics about feeling caged. (The duvet artwork encompasses a {photograph} of Eilish sinking right into a deep-blue abyss, just under a white door.) “Once I step off the stage I’m a fowl in a cage / I’m a canine in a canine pound,” she sings, on “Skinny.” On “Chihiro,” she is imploring: “Open up the door / Are you able to open up the door?” On “Blue,” which closes the album, she returns to each photographs:

Don’t know what’s in retailer
Open up the door
The again of my thoughts
I’m nonetheless abroad
A fowl in a cage

Claustrophobia, darkness, concern—these are all concepts that Eilish and O’Connell luxuriated in on “When We All Fall Asleep, The place Do We Go?,” however right here they really feel deeper, broader, and extra dramatic. Partway by means of “Blue,” Eilish begins chanting, her voice so flat and filtered that initially I believed it could be O’Connell. For Eilish, fame and despair are entangled, heavy predicaments to endure and, she hopes, survive:

And I might say the identical ’bout you
Born innocent grew up well-known too
Only a child born blue now

Musically, “Hit Me Onerous and Mushy” lands someplace between “When We All Fall Asleep, The place Do We Go?” and Eilish’s second album, “Happier Than Ever,” from 2021. Lately, Eilish’s songwriting has felt extra indebted to jazz-adjacent pop singers resembling Peggy Lee and Amy Winehouse than to the spooky despondency of 9 Inch Nails. “Hit Me Onerous and Mushy” is mature and nuanced, and that feels applicable—the religious distance between seventeen and twenty-two is huge—however I typically miss Eilish’s giddier and extra puerile aspect. Many listeners first got here to know Eilish by means of “Unhealthy Man,” the fifth single from “When We All Fall Asleep, The place Do We Go?” It’s a humorous and ingenious monitor, that includes a campy synthesizer riff and a dramatic tempo change. What made “Unhealthy Man” so intoxicating was the suave method it balanced youthful insouciance—that “Duh,” delivered on the finish of every refrain, was so completely saturated with teen-age disdain it felt like getting hit within the face with a water balloon—and a sort of playful, empowered sensuality. Within the track’s video, Eilish sports activities blue hair, and blood is smeared throughout her face; her eyes are vacant, unfeeling. However she additionally dances round like an unlimited goof, carrying an outsized butter-yellow sweatsuit, and leads a gang of dudes down a suburban avenue from behind the wheel of a toy race automobile.

That exact mixture—“Unhealthy Man” is equal components severe and foolish—jogs my memory of loads of issues, however particularly of intercourse, which could be solemn, typically sacred, but in addition fully absurd. Eilish embraces her carnal appetites on “Lunch,” a brand new track about pure animal lust:

I might eat that woman for lunch
Yeah she dances on my tongue
Tastes like she could be the one

For all of the hand-wringing concerning the lagging intercourse drive of youthful People, Eilish has been outspoken concerning the methods by which that form of bodily communion could be therapeutic. In a latest interview with Rolling Stone, she endorsed the myriad advantages of masturbation—“Folks must be jerking it, man”—and of feminine sexual pleasure extra typically. “I believe it’s such a frowned-upon factor to speak about, and I believe that ought to change,” she mentioned. “You requested me what I do to decompress? That shit can actually, actually prevent typically, simply saying. Can’t advocate it extra, to be actual.” “Lunch” is a bizarre, pulsing monitor, vigorous and sexy. It’s additionally my favourite track on the brand new album, partially as a result of Eilish sounds extremely free, which is to say, she seems like herself. ♦