Billie Eilish‘s new album Happier Than Ever arrives at the end of this month, and is by far the behemoth of the summer 2021 music release calendar. So far the singles have been diverse, from the quietly seething “Your Power” to the jazzy “Lost Cause”, and today we get the fraught “NDA”.
Working in the stark, blackened synth world that she made her name in, “NDA” finds Eilish in cagey, tense mood. As someone who has been in the spotlight since her mid-teens, and is unlikely to come out of it for years to come, she’s evidently feeling a little constricted about what she can do in her private life – if she can even have one at all. This is where we find her on “NDA”, annoyed that she can’t have parties and paranoid about the press discovering her latest booty call, so she goes creeping around at night and dreams about moving to Kawai. The skin-crawling energy perfectly animated with the plinking production, pin pricks on your skin as she tries to avoid prying eyes, before it comes out in the torrential chorus: “you try to save me but you can’t let me go.”
The feeling is even more viscerally produced in the video, where Eilish crawls along a pitch black road, only to be surrounded by speeding cars – no wonder Billie pronounced “THIS VIDEO WAS SO CRAZY TO SHOOOOOT” on her Instagram. Watch it below or listen to “NDA” on streaming platforms.
Billie Eilish’s new album Happier Than Ever comes out on July 30 (pre-order/save). You can find her on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
