Why Billie Eilish’s new album will be the hardest

With great power comes great responsibility, someone said. But what if those big responsibilities they almost end up overwhelming you like a tsunami? There are two possible answers: either you drown or you learn to swim. Billie Eilish didn’t have who knows what time to choose: she found herself surfing on the crest of success and even though she hasn’t yet found a balance – and she hasn’t learned to manage everything that revolves around the concept of success: see the recent accident of the “involuntary” coming out – remains standing. This will also and above all be what yours will talk about new albumofficially

ready to be distributed in stores and on platforms. The announcement came in the last few hours: “My new album has been mastered”, wrote the American pop star in a post shared on Instagram, a photo of her wearing a balaclava. The title and release date of the album have not been disclosed, but the anticipation is already sky-high.

Once upon a time, before streaming revolutionized the music market and also impacted the development of artists’ careers, transforming them from marathons to one hundred meters to be burned in a few moments, it was said that the third album was that of maturity. In one way or another we like to think, in the case of Billie Eilish, that this is still the case. The expression, although now an obsolete cliché, lends itself well to describing this very delicate phase of the career offormer child prodigy who became one of the most representative pop stars of her generation, who grew up without even realizing it. After the dazzling debut of 2019 with “When we all fall asleep, where do we go?” and the consecration of 2021 with “Happier than ever”, now the pop star is awaited by try harder: “It feels somewhat different from the rest of what I’ve released so far,” she said, offering a preview of the record, “for example: I’m twenty now. And my God, it’s so weird. I’ve never released music as an adult until now”.

Billie, who turned 22 just last December, recorded her ailments in “What was I made for?”, the song she wrote for the soundtrack of “Barbie” and which allowed her earlier this month to win two Grammy Awards (Song of the Year and Best Song Written for Visual Media): “I think I’ve forgotten how to be happy / something I’m not, but something I can be”, he sings in the lyrics of the song, anguished and even a little worrying. The theme of mental health of the pop artists who have become very topical again in Italy in recent days with Sangiovanni is a theme that Billie Eilish knows well and which she has addressed on several occasions in her public releases, so much so that she dedicated the awards won with “What was I made for? ” to “

anyone experiences desperation and feelings of existential dread and wonders, ‘Why am I here? What’s the point?‘”: “I just want to tell anyone who feels this way to be patient with themselves.” “What was I made for?”, on paper, is only an appetizer of what will be the successor to “Happier than ever”, whose difficult work will also be told in a documentary (but it is not known, at the moment, if will arrive on some streaming platform or directly to the cinema): “Last winter me and Finneas (the brother, creator of the sound of his records and today highly sought after by pop stars, ed.) we went through a period where we were both uninspired, incredibly”, Billie said. What pulled her – or rather, pulled them – out of the crisis was precisely the song then sent to Mark Ronson, supervisor and producer of the soundtrack of the film by Greta Gerwig which broke the billion dollar mark in worldwide box office: “This song was the first thing we managed to write. But for one I didn’t think about myself during the writing process. I was purely inspired by the movie and her character, the way I thought she felt like Barbie. And I wrote about it. Then listening to it again I said to myself: it’s as if I wrote about myself”.

If in “Happier than ever” Billie talked about her growth, singing about how success had turned her life upside down, in the new album she will talk about what it’s like to feel like a broken Barbie in a world that only wants polished Barbies: “The leap between 18 and 21 is a big leap. It was all different. My voice has also changed, completely. It is difficult to accept change. No one told me that when you grow up you stop recognizing your younger self”, she said, who then He called “Bad Guy”, one of his biggest hits, “the stupidest song in the world” and as “an act of trolling”. The risk, therefore, is that not even the fans recognize her.