Pop Is Making Happiness Sound Pretty Dreary Lately
Billie Eilish has some scary problems, she tells listeners on her new album’s first song, “Getting Older.” A stranger outside her door is acting deranged. Loneliness and burnout mount in her mind. Abuse and trauma darken her past. She murmurs about these things over a synthesizer that pulses like a time bomb. It never seems to explode, but the final verse does contain a shock.
“For anybody asking,” Eilish sings, “I promise I’ll be fine.”
Fine has not always been Eilish’s thing. Her 2019 debut, When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?, swept the major Grammy categories and sold with cleverly constructed tales of feeling not okay., , and swirled in her thoughts—and the drama of the songs lay in the sense that she could, in some awful turn, fall victim to the things that terrorized her. At the climax of the album’s runtime, she sang a farewell from the edge of a building. The song, “Listen Before I Go,” faded out in a din of sirens.
