The Anxious Love Songs of Billie Eilish

Earlier this 12 months, the singer and songwriter Billie Eilish, who’s twenty-two, grew to become the youngest two-time Oscar winner in historical past, gathering the Finest Authentic Tune award for “What Was I Made For?,” a fragile existential ballad that she co-wrote for the movie “Barbie.” (She additionally gained in 2022, for “No Time to Die,” a moody and portentous Bond theme.) By the way, Eilish can also be the youngest particular person ever to have a clear sweep of all 4 of the principle Grammy classes (Finest New Artist, Document of the 12 months, Tune 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 may 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 advised the group. “We rise 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 turn into such a lodestone for business accolades. “Man am I the best / God I hate it,” Eilish sings on “The Best,” a forlorn, walloping tune from her compact however highly effective new album, “Hit Me Arduous and Comfortable,” which was simply launched.

Eilish is thought for taking her time in a tune, generally crawling by a melody as if it had been a bowl of molasses, and he or she typically chooses to sing in a whisper, letting a word grasp within the air earlier than it dissipates totally. Her vocal fashion jogs my memory of an evanescing cloud of smoke after somebody blows out a cluster of birthday candles—lovely, fleeting, slightly bit haunted. But, on “The Best,” Eilish belts and bellows. “I waited / And waited,” she wails, her voice getting larger and greater. It’s uncommon to search out Eilish in bloodletting mode, however fury and loudness swimsuit her, too. Lyrically, a lot of “Hit Me Arduous and Comfortable” is about wanting a relationship however failing, in some elementary and inescapable means, to maintain closeness with one other particular person. It’s an fascinating drawback: 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 susceptible to sudden modifications and reinventions, ups and downs. Quicker, slower, shut, far, right here, gone. “L’Amour de Ma Vie,” a brand new tune a few soured relationship—“You had been so mediocre,” Eilish sings—shifts from a lovelorn, jazz-inflected torch tune right into a pulsing membership banger, chilly and threatening. In much less assured palms, 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 tune be mild and aggressive, grounded and spectral? Isn’t love?

From the beginning of her profession, Eilish has by no means been significantly comfy with superstar, and at instances she has appeared viscerally repelled by it; the nervousness and paranoia introduced on by international fame are one other theme right here, and are maybe immediately accountable 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. “Individuals say I look joyful / Simply because I received skinny / However the outdated me continues to be me and perhaps the actual me / And I believe she’s fairly,” Eilish sings, her voice feathery and resigned. (“The Web is hungry for the meanest type of humorous / And someone’s gotta feed it,” she factors out.) “Skinny” is a beautiful tune, 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 moreover Eilish, O’Connell, and Eilish’s tour drummer, Andrew Marshall.

Eilish writes typically about management, an concept that manifests in pictures of closed doorways and lyrics about feeling caged. (The quilt artwork includes a {photograph} of Eilish sinking right into a deep-blue abyss, just under a white door.) “After I step off the stage I’m a chicken 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 pictures:

Don’t know what’s in retailer
Open up the door
The again of my thoughts
I’m nonetheless abroad
A chicken 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 “Blue,” Eilish begins chanting, her voice so flat and filtered that initially I assumed it could be O’Connell. For Eilish, fame and despair are entangled, heavy predicaments to endure and, she hopes, survive:

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

Musically, “Hit Me Arduous and Comfortable” 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 akin to Peggy Lee and Amy Winehouse than to the spooky despondency of 9 Inch Nails. “Hit Me Arduous and Comfortable” is mature and nuanced, and that feels applicable—the religious distance between seventeen and twenty-two is huge—however I generally miss Eilish’s giddier and extra puerile facet. Many listeners first got here to know Eilish by “Dangerous Man,” the fifth single from “When We All Fall Asleep, The place Do We Go?” It’s a humorous and ingenious observe, that includes a campy synthesizer riff and a dramatic tempo change. What made “Dangerous Man” so intoxicating was the suave means 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 type of playful, empowered sensuality. Within the tune’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 infinite 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 automotive.

That specific mixture—“Dangerous Man” is equal components critical and foolish—jogs my memory of numerous issues, however particularly of intercourse, which may be solemn, generally sacred, but in addition utterly absurd. Eilish embraces her carnal appetites on “Lunch,” a brand new tune about pure animal lust:

I may 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 Individuals, Eilish has been outspoken concerning the methods wherein that type of bodily communion may be therapeutic. In a current interview with Rolling Stone, she endorsed the myriad advantages of masturbation—“Individuals must be jerking it, man”—and of feminine sexual pleasure extra usually. “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 generally, simply saying. Can’t suggest it extra, to be actual.” “Lunch” is a bizarre, pulsing observe, vigorous and attractive. It’s additionally my favourite tune on the brand new album, partly as a result of Eilish sounds extremely free, which is to say, she feels like herself. ♦