Age of Anxiety

The love songs of Billie Eilish.

- By Amanda Petrusich

Eilish takes her time in a song, sometimes crawling through a melody.

Earlier this year, the singer and songwriter Billie Eilish, who is twenty two, became the youngest two-time Oscar winner in history, collecting the Best Original Song award for “What Was I Made For?,” a delicate existential ballad that she co-wrote for the film “Barbie.” (She also won in 2022, for “No Time to Die,” a moody and portentous Bond theme.) Incidentally, Eilish is also the youngest person ever to have a clean sweep of all four of the main Grammy categories (Best New Artist, Record of the Year, Song of the Year, and Album of the Year), which she achieved in 2020, for her début LP, “When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?” At that year’s ceremony, moments before Album of the Year was announced, Eilish can be seen mouthing, “Please don’t be me”; onstage, standing alongside her brother Finneas O’Connell, who is also her co-writer and producer, she seemed bewildered, if not mortified. “We wrote an album about depression, and suicidal thoughts, and climate change,” O’Connell told the crowd. “We stand up here confused and grateful.” It’s both heartening and slightly mystifying that Eilish, who writes sombre, idiosyncratic, gothtinged electro-pop about her loneliness and boredom, has become such a lodestone for industry accolades. “Man am I the greatest / God I hate it,” Eilish sings on “The Greatest,” a forlorn, walloping song from her compact but powerful new album, “Hit Me Hard and Soft,” which was just released.