POP/ROCK

Billie Eilish, "Happier Than Ever" (Interscope)

Eilish's hugely successful 2019 debut, "When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go," struck a careful balance between expression and obfuscation. She clearly delighted in keeping certain things to herself.

On "Getting Older," the opener to her second album, Eilish announces a more candid phase. The song is a snapshot of her psyche on the other side of her Grammy-grabbing fame and its top-of-the-mountain ennui somehow finds the aesthetic common ground between Drake and Peggy Lee.

The antagonists of Eilish's debut were stylistically macabre: demons haunting her mind and monsters lurking under her bed. On "Happier Than Ever," the boogeymen are indifferent boyfriends, parasitic hangers-on and abusive older men.

Although neither directly autobiographical nor confessional, "Happier Than Ever" is fixated on the tension between private and public knowledge, a social-media-era pop star's meditation on how much candor — if any — she owes her fans.

"I bought a secret house when I was 17," Eilish, now 19, sings on "NDA," one of the album's most compelling tunes. "Had a pretty boy over but he couldn't stay/On his way out made him sign an NDA."

"Happier Than Ever" is partly a chronicle of a wildly successful, obsessively surveilled young woman trying to date and explore her desires. On the swoony ballad "Halley's Comet," Eilish bemoans the disconnect inherent in this workaholic lifestyle. Elsewhere, though, on "Billie Bossa Nova" or the industrial-tinged "Oxytocin," Eilish revels in the thrill of having to sneak around to get her kicks.

Perhaps the album's most exhilarating moment comes on the title track, a politely restrained ditty that explodes mid-song into a distortion-charged power ballad. Eilish unleashes a disarmingly earnest torrent of bottled-up grievances: "Always said you were misunderstood/Made all my moments your own/Just [expletive] leave me alone." For a fleeting moment, she has given away all her secrets, and she sounds invigoratingly unburdened.

Lindsey Zoladz, New York Times

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