Billie Eilish’s meteoric ascent has seen much turbulence, both avoidable and unavoidable.

She ditched the jet-black mop with slime-green highlights that had become a signature look throughout the rollout of her 2019 debut, When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?, and its tour, and bid farewell to the long, flowing suits some onlookers crassly compared to ’90s rapper clothes, returning to her natural blonde locks and unveiling a new wardrobe that challenged the presumption that she was leery of people’s prying eyes.

Happier Than Ever, Eilish’s sophomore album, spells out the differences in the singer’s life in greater detail than what we’ve surmised from the bread crumbs in her Instagram posts and interviews.

In many ways, it’s your textbook sophomore project: It is, in part, a reaction to the jarring experience of rapidly becoming a public figure behind a hit album and the unexpected life changes this entails — the love, the scrutiny, the lack of boundaries, and the heightened parasocial expectations.

“NDA” is a look at the nagging pitfalls of celebrity: “Got a stalker walking up and down the street / Says he’s Satan and he’d like to meet / I bought a secret house when I was 17 / Haven’t had a party since I got the keys.” The interlude “Not My Responsibility,” originally a piece that played during the When We All Fall Asleep tour, is a stern rejoinder to anyone who gossiped about the singer’s body: “I feel you watching, always / And nothing I do goes unseen / So while I feel your stares, your disapproval, your sigh of relief / If I lived by them, I’d never be able to move.” Where on the first album, Billie sometimes feels like a spectral narrator wandering through scenes of disarray, pondering the afterlife, and tiptoeing through salacious drug parties, here, she is owning her body and the lust and rage and pain and the rational and irrational pangs that come with it.

The disparate threads of the advance singles — see: the subtle nu-jazz accents in “My Future,” the gutting folk of “Your Power,” and the sinister electropop of “Therefore I Am,” one of the few callbacks to the sounds of When We All Fall Asleep — are tied together into an album that, like its predecessor, sets itself apart from the sonics most contemporary pop stars favor.

Eilish’s first album made mutant pop with unconventional instrumentation, but Happier Than Ever is at once the more conventional-sounding body of work and the less predictable of the pair.

Eilish’s deceptively muted vocals and unflinching, commanding presence make a tantalizing combo, and the unexpected twists that Finneas’s production takes underfoot all carry this album to places the first one wasn’t prepared to visit.

You think it’s going to mirror the wispy, exceedingly dark trilogy of songs that close out the last album when it creaks in like a sad, old country breakup tune.