In the mood for some literal bedroom pop? Billie Eilish’s latest video for Vevo’s Official Live Performance series is out now, and it finds the singer cooing the gentle, heartbroken closing track from her new album Happier Than Ever in a wood paneled hotel boudoir.
“’Cause I loved you then, and I love you now / And I don’t know how / ’Cause it’s hard to know when nobody else comes ’round,” Eilish sings with her signature quiet power.
It’s a break-up song on which she is possibly more vulnerable than she’s ever been before. As New York Times critic Lindsay Zoladz writes in her review of Happier Than Ever, “‘Male Fantasy’ shocks not because of its casual mentions of pornography and body image issues, but for how completely Eilish lets her ever-present emotional armor fall.”
The clip is the second in her series for Vevo, following “Your Power.” As in the previous performance, Eilish is joined once again by her brother and collaborator Finneas, who strums his acoustic guitar and lends vocal harmonies from across the room.
Eilish is just the latest artist to collaborate with Vevo for the streaming platform’s Official Live Performance series. Recently, Ariana Grande, The Weeknd and Justin Bieber have all created unique environments in which to perform live versions of their music. For her videos, Eilish seems to be sticking with the same warm, muted, neutral color palette as the album art for Happier Than Ever and her own self-directed official music videos for the album’s recent singles. The atmosphere is intimate, the perfect setting for her introspective new songs. Vevo promises two more Eilish videos in the coming weeks.
Meanwhile, Happier Than Ever is getting rave reviews for Eilish’s unsparing examination of her rise to fame and the traumatic effects of all the attention that followed. “Happier Than Ever is partially a chronicle of a wildly successful, obsessively surveilled young woman trying to date and explore her desires,” Zoladz writes, while Pitchfork calls Eilish’s follow-up to the Grammy winning When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? a “showcase for her command over the pop landscape.”
