SKINNY - Initially this song just felt like a spin off of Getting Older, the opener of Happier Than Ever - both songs address growing up and maturing, chapters opening and closing, and navigating all of that happening in the public eye. I guess Billie, being only 22, is uniquely situated in that she probably could get away with having a ‘so-this-is-what’s-changed-since-my-last-album’ opener to every body of work she releases. It’s always relevant and interesting, given so many of us feel like we grew up with her. However, it’s not exactly boundary pushing. A significant differentiating factor is the orchestral component - the live strings incorporated into this album are the first live session musicians Billie and Finneas worked with on any of their music. The song is slightly dreamier and more ambiguous that Getting Older, but I still think it doesn’t quite trump their last opening song. Played as part of the whole though, it is an invaluable puzzle piece in the jigsaw of this album; unlike their others, melodies from other songs weave in and out - most notably the motif from The Greatest. Billie’s voice also has a lot more gusto, graduating into a belt not even two minutes into the song. Her delivery has an undertone of desperation, especially in the line ‘But the old me is still me and maybe the real me and I think she’s pretty’ - it feels like it cascades out of her, like when you can only get out a secret or a deep thought by blurting it all at once. A throbbing sense of panic emerges in the second verse, her voice becoming more breathless, before it is soothed by the lulling strings.

LUNCH - My jaw was on the floor the first time hearing this one - a fine example of Billie and Finneas at their best; a thumping bass line with Billie’s vocals layered delicately over the top, and sprinkles of humour in the lyrics providing light and shade. Even pairing it back to back with SKINNY feels like a little wink-wink moment, in both their connecting titles and the catapult from the vulnerable confessional of SKINNY to the club-worthy LUNCH. In her recent interview with Zane Lowe, Billie spoke about the risk of being cringe - there is certainly a big capacity for that with LUNCH, with lyrics that are pretty explicitly sexual while staying very simple. Lines like ‘I could buy her so much stuff’ could easily have fallen flat, but Billie’s delivery more than pulls it off, which is no mean feat. She explained her thinking behind this risk to Lowe - ‘When you start to embrace cringe, you are so much happier and so much more fun’.

CHIHIRO - With this song, the album starts to feel more cinematic. Not really following any regular structure, the world of the song feels presented through a lens that falls in and out of focus. It is dreamy, and while it keeps an echo of the club atmosphere of LUNCH, its core is melancholy. The song loosely channels the world of the Miyazaki film Spirited Away, a childhood favourite of Eilish. The lyrical motif of ‘open up the door’ gets its first introduction in CHIHIRO before finding its way into later songs. It’s also woven into the album artwork - we see Billie floating beneath an open door; whether she has tumbled out of it into the water below or is floating up towards it remains up to our interpretation. CHIHIRO, along with the final two tracks BITTERSUITE and BLUE, feel like the core soundtrack to that image and are my favourites on the album - all three songs feel as if they are spinning, spiralling and falling, episodic in their structure as they drift through different lyrical and musical themes.

BIRDS OF A FEATHER - BIRDS OF A FEATHER brings a completely new vibe to Eilish’s music, a proper old school pop sound that we have not heard from her before. I don’t usually like songs in this style, but in the context of this album and Billie’s wider work it’s a fun listen. The whole thing feels so smooth and crisp in its production that even if it’s not particularly to my taste I can’t help being in awe at the sibling’s craft - not to mention Billie’s mega-belt during this song, showcasing a whole new range she hasn’t before.

WILDFLOWER - Along with BIRDS OF A FEATHER, it’s with these two songs that I feel the album takes a slight dip. In joining the list of ‘sad-Billie-Eilish-songs’, WILDFLOWER struggles to stand out against the other songs on that list. Compared to songs like lovely, What Was I Made For? and everything i wanted that have close to a billion streams on Spotify, WILDFLOWER doesn’t particularly stand out. The sing-song bridge and outro is the highlight here for me, and I appreciate Billie writing about a situation where she was the one who acted questionably - the lyrics feel mature and poetic. But overall, this song feels quite generic.

THE GREATEST - I think this is the best stand alone song on the album; so much of the other tracks need the wider context of the album to really be best appreciated, whereas THE GREATEST is a triumph, alone or not. There have been some criticisms of it being in the shadow of her last album’s title song, Happier Than Ever, which I understand as they both follow a similar dramatic arc, but I don’t think Billie and Finneas were trying to create a dupe of that song. Happier Than Ever shifts gears totally in the middle, catapulting the listener between genres and feel as it unveils a hidden undercurrent bubbling under the surface. THE GREATEST is more of a linear crescendo; the bubbling rises up and pours out while the song stays in the same world. It is more of a lament than the explosion of Happier Than Ever, and while I still believe the latter is her greatest song to date, untrumped by this new offering, I reckon that it is actually much harder to achieve that pretty epic crescendo with the production as stripped back as it is in THE GREATEST. It is also more tuneful, providing us with the string motif that opens and closes the album.

L’AMOUR DE MA VIE - Billie’s voice slides into this song in a new, almost jazzy delivery that is a fun contrast to her usual style. With pretty cruel and passive aggressive lyrics, this song is pretty much a diss track of an old lover - her sarcasm is contradictory to the pain and desperation we have just heard in THE GREATEST, making this an even more accurate portrayal of falling in and out of love, an experience that is itself full of contradictions. It sounds like perhaps she is trying to convince herself of the ‘I never even liked you that much in the first place’ narrative, in order to protect her feelings. Whatever the motivation behind this song, I’m sure a lot of people relate to Billie’s nuanced portrayal of trying to process a break up. However, in the final part there is a synth break which (and I don’t use this word often!) I really quite hate. It feels so out of place, and just reminds me of The Weeknds Blinding Lights, another song that I detest. While I really love the first half and the last 20-30 seconds of the bridge, I cannot help but skip when those synths come in!

THE DINER - Hailing from the same sonic world as bad guy, THE DINER is a crowdpleaser - we see Billie and Finneas do the thing that first catapulted them to global success as they curate a haunting, vaguely seductive atmosphere. Sung from the perspective of a stalker, Billie’s delicate vocals come across even more creepy given the lyrical content; ‘Don’t be afraid of me, I’m what you need, I saw you on the screens, I know we’re meant to be’. It’s with THE DINER that the real home straight begins, the beginning of the final crescendo of this album.

BITTERSUITE - On its own, this song’s structure is so episodic that it doesn’t even really feel like one song. It definitely seems to serve as a sister song to CHIHIRO, and thus is strongest when listened to in the wider context of the album. I love the stabbing bass line that comes in after the verse first, leading us into a chorus that pulses with anticipation, a sense of building that is inevitably going to come in the impending finale to the album. However, it’s over before it’s begun, shifting into a jaunty, whispered section that is much more reminiscent of Billie’s earliest work. It feels a bit disjointed, but when paired with BLUE the constant picking up and dropping of ideas feels more like taunting, teasing us with the finale we know is coming, rather than indecisiveness. I’m obsessed with the synth melody at the end - it is so simple but carries such an epic scale and build up. As with CHIHIRO, this song sounds like the cover art looks - like we are sinking underwater, elements swimming in and out of focus.

BLUE - BLUE started its life as True Blue, a demo on Soundcloud written by the pair when Billie was 14 and Finneas 18. While she performed it live a few times on previous tours, the song aged out of the work they were making and became semi-forgotten. After being removed from the platform, it was subsequently leaked again in 2022, six years after its creation. In her Zane Lowe interview, Billie explained she was initially irritated about it being leaked - before realising it was an absolute bop. Along with another unreleased song, Born Blue, that didn’t make the final cut for Happier Than Ever, BLUE is a weaving together of the duo’s old and new work, with the string motif from THE GREATEST tied in at the end. Especially when listened with BITTERSUITE preceding it, BLUE is a triumph. It wraps together key lines from each of the other songs on the album, creating an epic finale. The songs strips back in the middle section, where we hear Billie trying to justify the behaviour of an old partner; I don’t hate you, but I can’t save you. For me, one of the most powerful emotional punches of the whole album comes at the turning point of this section - after trying to reason with the justification for this person’s behaviour, reason gives way back into anger. Billie’s voice, pitched down, whispers out lyrics that pulse with rage over eerie strings. As the song and album closes, a sense of acceptance around this anger emerges - but it does not dull its sincerity. Right at the end, we hear Billie ask ‘When can I hear the next one?’ before looping back into the start of SKINNY, with a transition so smooth one barely notices - it’s a challenge not to stay looping round and round the world of this album for hours on end. Despite the creative blocks Billie and Finneas have mentioned in interviews, and the pressure of the creative treadmill they allude to in that final adlib line, in HIT ME HARD AND SOFT the pair have created their most mature and immersive work to date.