On April 27, pop wunderkind Billie Eilish announced her much-anticipated second album, “Happier Than Ever.” The cover, also revealed, is a marked departure from that of her previous work — the color palette is a tonal blend of beige, cream and Eilish’s newly blond hair, undeniably separating it from the high-contrast black and white of 2019’s “WHEN WE ALL FALL ASLEEP, WHERE DO WE GO?.” 

The albums’ respective titles reflect a shift into a gentler, more optimistic headspace. Her debut’s all-caps, brazen question — itself a lyric from a song about Eilish’s sleep paralysis — is gone, replaced with a matter-of-fact statement. Along with the excitement, seemingly as much for the new direction as the new music, the reveal has garnered comparisons to fellow pop icon Ariana Grande’s 2018 album “Sweetener.” Both covers feature the respective artists in an angelic, blush-toned environment, looking upward with shiny eyes; the titles hint at their creators’ feeling of buoyancy. But the similarity goes beyond the surface, revealing a trend toward lighter, sweeter and softer music and themes, ones that may be nods to a shift in the zeitgeist post-pandemic.

“Sweetener” doesn’t seem like a natural progression from its predecessor, 2016’s “Dangerous Woman,” with that album’s sleek, black and vintage-inspired aesthetic and lyrical references to Grande’s empowerment in her sexuality. In many ways, it shouldn’t have been. The expected trajectory was likely interrupted by the fatal bombing in Manchester following Grande’s concert on May 22, 2017, which — to say nothing of the impact on the victims, the concertgoers and the music industry’s climate — affected Grande profoundly. “Sweetener” is a response, direct and indirect, to the aftermath and her phoenix-like emergence into hope after tragedy. This triumph is, maybe surprisingly, not embodied with bright pop anthems, but in lower-key, vocal-focused R&B-pop fusions. The album’s opening track, “raindrops (an angel cried)” best encapsulates the ethos of the project: a 37-second a cappella clip paying homage to The Four Seasons’ “An Angel Cried.” 

She’s all vocals and all lyrics, no affected production to twist or hide the rawness. She’s all emotion. The softness of this era in her career is notable because of the way she willingly exposes her soft spot. Her happiness is fallible and this fact is plain. She understands how fleeting the moment of bliss she’s in the midst of on “R.E.M.” is: “before you speak, don’t move / ‘cause I don’t want to wake up.” These moments are the ones that make the album distinctive. The magic lies in the subdued vulnerability, stripping away many electronic flourishes and much one-liner lyricism. “Sweetener” focuses on Grande, directly emotional and softly vulnerable.

Not as much is known about “Happier Than Ever.” But the smattering of singles, visuals, and snippets released so far point to a similar core. The title strikingly alludes to a turning point in Eilish’s public battle with her mental health. Excluding “Therefore I Am,” which feels at home with much of the rest of Eilish’s precocious, twitchy discography — a natural stone on the path of  “COPYCAT” and “all the good girls go to hell” — the vibe is overall lighter and more direct. Recent single “Your Power” asks the subject, uncloaked in the metaphor and dreamscape of her past work, to “try not to abuse [their] power.” This unwavering, unguarded request — which Eilish then revealed was derived from her own experience in an abusive relationship — is made over grounded acoustic guitar and little else. The simplicity makes the emotion the focal point, Eilish’s raw vocals and the sparseness of the track shows that she, like Grande, is exposing her Achilles’ heel. She shows it not as an open wound, but as a facet of the wholeness that she has accepted to become this new version of herself.

Grande and Eilish aren’t the only pop artists to transition into this soft era of their careers after a dark personal period. Taylor Swift released “Lover” in 2019 (“all’s well that ends well to end up with you”) on the heels of widespread backlash against her in a conflict with Kanye West and her musical response, 2017’s “reputation.” Beyonce’s “Lemonade” in 2016 chronicles her healing from Jay-Z’s infidelity (“and true love never has to hide / I’ll trade your broken wings for mine”) through subdued hip-hop and blues-influenced instrumentals.

This phenomenon of happiness after adversity often involves smaller, softer moments of joy more than the euphoric highs that one might expect to balance a down time. However, after these deeply emotional, vulnerable times, again and again they embrace that soft spot and move forward with it, neither discarding nor obscuring it. 

While this guiding philosophy has most visibly and most often applied to the deeply personal, it may not be confined to that. Pop music looks outward as well as inward and reflects the broader landscape. Speaking to Rolling Stone ahead of “WHEN WE ALL FALL ASLEEP…”, Eilish explained that “there’s a line on there about hills burning in California. That’s a natural thing to have now…that’s fucked!” Pop’s appeal and relatability is as much about articulating the state of the world as the artist’s mindset, and the trend of gentle hope after darkness could also have a place outside of music. In the same way that the California wildfires informed Eilish’s past lyrics, her new ideas also look into what handling the approaching era might look like. As the end of a global period of upheaval is in sight, the way forward is not to turn a blind eye to events that have dominated the news cycle and collective headspace over the last several months, but to take them into the new era, softening them with the new experience and hope gained.

In the U.S., vaccines are being rolled out and many are growing restless with the just-out-of-reach hope of life post-pandemic. Proclamations of enormous plans to make up for lost time and phrases like “hot girl summer” (or its 2021-specific variant, “vaxxed girl summer”) pepper the internet and the promise of a “return to normal” seems increasingly likely. This great comeback on the horizon, however, caches many of the soft spots that Covid-19 has exposed over the last year and a half. From food insecurity more than doubling after the pandemic’s onset to an increase in violence against Asian Americans, a variety of weaknesses have been brought to the surface. 

These vulnerabilities of the national and global reality can’t be ignored now that they’ve been seen; many social media feeds have remained hubs of social awareness beyond the information about Covid-19 that they initially sought to spread. Though there may not be a shift in aesthetic or sound to point to as an indication of it, culturally, the new era is dawning with the shapes of these discrepancies still carved into it. 

Strong as the temptation may be to run headlong into an anthemic return to the old way of doing things, the pattern within pop music has revealed that the truest recovery has to move forward with, not around, weakness and hardship. In order to really heal, that softness has to have space and be engaged with head-on. Time and time again, the soft era has provided an important cue to follow: the only way out is through.