Songfacts®:

• This song finds Billie Eilish addressing a lover with whom she has a volatile relationship. He calls her up when drunk, never shows up on time, and basically makes her miserable. It's only when she's away from him she's truly happy.
• The target of this kiss off appears to be LA rapper Brandon Adams, whom Eilish dated for a year before breaking up in June 2019. Fans also believe the single "Your Power" is about him.
• The song finds Eilish breaking away from the dreamlike electropop sound of her debut album When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? Starting off as a gentle ballad, it breaks into a distorted-guitar-driven rager incorporating distant screams and a soaring guitar solo. "It was very satisfying to scream," Eilish told British Vogue. "Because I was very angry. There's so much anger in those songs - anger and disappointment and frustration."
• Billie Eilish wrote the track with her brother and usual songwriting partner, Finneas O'Connell. It was the first tune they penned for her second album during the late summer 2019's When We All Fall Asleep European Tour. She originally titled it "Away From You."
• Eilish directed the thunderous video herself. The clip shows the pop star belting the song as she escapes a flooding house. She told Elle the scenario was a creative decision made to help her face a fear of water. "I was terrified of drowning and having my head stuck underwater," she said. "But I'm a daredevil. I want to do everything that scares me."
  
  To conquer her phobia, Eilish jumped right in, literally and figuratively. "Half of the video was shot underwater," she said. "So I pretty much overcame my fear of water. It was f---ing crazy, dude."
• This is the title track of Eilish's second album. She told Rolling Stone the name came from something her mother said to her: "When you're happier than ever, that doesn't mean you're the happiest that anyone's ever been. It means you're happier than you were before."
• While the song title references Eilish being more contented without her lover, she named the album Happier Than Ever for a different reason. The pop star explained to Audacy's Julia she felt like the title "encapsulated the last few years of my life really well, in a way that I thought the fans would understand. Just because I feel that when I was coming up, and getting bigger, I was actually very depressed and over time I feel that I, very obviously, my mental state rose and got so much better. I feel the fans really knew that and could see it."
• Billie Eilish performed the song live for the first time at the iHeartRadio Festival on September 19, 2021. Eilish's five-song set marked her return to the live stage following the COVID lockdown. It also included the performance debut of another Happier Than Ever track, "Oxytocin."
• Eilish put a very different spin on this song when she sang it with The Count on a 2021 episode of Sesame Street. "When I'm counting with you, I'm happier than ever," she sings to him. They spend the rest of the song counting to two.
• Billie Eilish performed this song along with "Male Fantasy" on the December 11, 2021 episode of Saturday Night Live.
• Billie Eilish and Finneas started writing the song in the summer of 2019. They were in a Danish town feeling super jet lagged, and Finneas had a small toy guitar he'd bought for $80. They started writing the "When I'm away from you, I'm happier than ever" part, which correlated to what Eilish was going through in her life at that particular moment. "We knew that we liked that idea," Finneas told Billboard, "but we weren't in the period of time where we were like crunching down on an album, so we just put it in our back pocket and we'd write a line or two here and there."
  
  Eight months later, Eilish and Finneas were in lockdown and working on an album. They revisited the idea and completed the second half of the song in early summer 2020, writing it acoustically. "That's a pretty long writing lifespan for songs - usually, songs are written pretty quickly," Finneas said. "I think it's a testament to how long and winding that song is in and of itself, so it was a really fulfilling process. I'm so happy with the way it turned out."
• Eilish made a splash at the Grammy Awards in 2022 when she performed this song on a set resembling an upside-down room with about 12 inches of water on the floor (actually, the ceiling). Midway through the performance, she went up a level and performed it on the roof of the set in a simulated thunderstorm, which explained the water. Eilish wore a Taylor Hawkins T-shirt, honoring the Foo Fighters drummer who died a week earlier.
  
  "Happier Than Ever" was nominated for Song Of The Year and Record Of The Year, but "Leave The Door Open" by Silk Sonic won both of those awards.
• Billie Eilish headlined the first night of the 2022 Glastonbury Festival in the United Kingdom, becoming the festival's youngest headliner. She concluded her performance with a rendition of "Happier Than Ever," accompanied by a massive display of pyrotechnics. The song returned to the Top 40 of the UK singles chart the following week.
• "Happier Than Ever" earned Song Of The Year at the MTV Video Music Awards in 2022.
• "Happier Than Ever" shows up in the 2025 series finale of the fifth and final season of Netflix' You.