Billie Eilish’s third album opens with a track called Skinny. It features a hushed electric guitar figure supporting a lyric filled with very Billie Eilish topics: bitter recriminations about a failed relationship, body dysmorphia, depression and the pressures of finding vast global fame while barely out of your teens. The latter was a theme that preoccupied Eilish’s last album, 2021’s Happier Than Ever, a grimly believable depiction of adolescent stardom in a world of constant online commentary and confected controversy. With its marked shift in image and sound, it succeeded in creating yet more commentary and controversy. That album’s reception is another topic that seems to haunt Skinny. “Am I acting my age now?” she wonders aloud. “Am I already on the way out?”
It’s presumably a reference to the fact that Happier Than Ever sold noticeably less than Eilish’s debut, When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?: it only went platinum in 10 countries as opposed to 16. And perhaps also to the idea that, with its relative lack of the kind of electro-goth bangers that had propelled her to fame, and her accompanying transformation from baggy skateware-clad sulker to vampy 50s blonde, Happier Than Ever had lost the room.
