"Your Power" is a song by American singer-songwriter Billie Eilish and the third single from her second studio album, Happier Than Ever (2021). It was released on April 29, 2021, through Darkroom and Interscope Records. A folk and downtempo ballad backed by an acoustic guitar, the song is a plea for people to stop abusing their authority, and it mainly addresses men who exploit vulnerable women. Its lyrics narrate a damaging sexual relationship between a female high school student and an older man, exploring the topics of domestic abuse, sexual harassment, and statutory rape. Eilish wrote "Your Power" with her producer who is her brother, Finneas O'Connell.
Named one of the best songs of 2021 in Variety and The Guardian, "Your Power" was praised for its candid songwriting, the emotional impact of its critiques of abuse, and the relevance of its lyrics to contemporary society. It won Best Video with a Social Message at the 2021 MTV Video Music Awards. During its opening week, the song received 64.2 million streams and sold 8,600 digital copies worldwide. "Your Power" reached the top 10 in over 20 countries; it was Eilish's fifth top 10 song and third top 10 debut in the United States. It peaked at number 6 on the Billboard Global 200 chart, her second top 10 single there.
Eilish directed the music video for "Your Power", which premiered on the same day as the song's release. In it, she sings alone in the Simi Valley while an anaconda wraps itself around her. She first performed the song live on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, and she included it in the set lists of a 2021 concert film and a 2022–2023 world tour in support of Happier Than Ever. Eilish also performed "Your Power" to protest the overturning of Roe v. Wade by the US Supreme Court, a landmark decision that removed abortion's status as a constitutional right in the country.
Background and release
At the age of 18, Billie Eilish won five awards at the 62nd Annual Grammy Awards held in 2020. These include Album of the Year for her debut studio album, When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? (2019). It was a commercial success, debuting at number one on many national record charts and bringing her mainstream fame. Eilish disclosed she would begin work on her second studio album in 2020. Introducing it in an interview with Rolling Stone, she said that "almost none of the songs on this album are joyful". Its lyrical themes include the unhealthy effects of fame and the struggles that young women experience in the entertainment industry, such as misogyny, power imbalance, and emotional abuse. On April 27, 2021, Eilish announced the album's title was Happier Than Ever, and she revealed "Your Power" as the twelfth song on the track list.
A day after the announcement, Eilish posted a nine-second snippet of the song to her social media accounts and previewed the visuals for its music video. "Your Power" was released worldwide as a single from the album the next day. It is the third single from Happier Than Ever, after the 2020 songs "My Future" and "Therefore I Am". In the caption for an Instagram post that accompanied its release, Eilish said it was one of her favorite songs she had written and its candid and confessional lyrics made her feel vulnerable. She continued: "This is about many different situations that we've all either witnessed or experienced. I hope this can inspire change. Try not to abuse your power." Darkroom and Interscope Records promoted the song to alternative and contemporary hit radio stations in the United States on May 4, 2021.
After the song's release, Eilish gave an interview for the British edition of Vogue. She talked about how her life had greatly changed since she was a child, as well as the negative aspects of fame and her struggles with self-acceptance. Dubbing "Your Power" as an "open letter to people who take advantage", Eilish explained that it sought to discuss the confluence between sexual misconduct and body image. To further contextualize its themes, she stated that she was sexually abused during her childhood:
During a BBC 100 Women interview, Eilish said that almost every person would find "Your Power" relatable because she wrote it to be about many people she had met who had had difficulties with handling their influence over others carefully. In her words, "[i]t's hard to have power and it's really hard when you really don't have any power and suddenly you have a lot of power. It's hard not to take advantage of it and abuse it." One example she cited was when she was in a toxic relationship with a man who, according to her, was very physically and emotionally abusive: "When I hear this song, I think of[...] how much trauma he has caused me[.]"
Music and lyrics
"Your Power" is a folk ballad; Jordan Darville of The Fader wrote that the song shifts towards indie folk, while Pitchfork's Cat Zhang described the song as downtempo. It has a minimalist production that emphasizes Eilish's vocal performance; she sings in a falsetto vocal register and uses a soft vocal style, and there is a reverberating effect on her voice. Acoustic guitars are the song's primary instruments, indicating a shift from the sound of Eilish's earlier works. The Guardians Alexis Petridis contrasted the acoustic composition with what he described as the "electronic horror-movie soundtrack approach" of When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? Furthermore, he argued that "Your Power" drew musical influences from the works of alternative performers Mazzy Star and Lana Del Rey. Other critics compared it to songs by soft rock band America, indie folk singer Phoebe Bridgers, and artists from the Laurel Canyon music scene based on its acoustic production and personal lyrics.
The song is a plea for people to stop abusing their authority—it mainly focuses on men who take advantage of young and vulnerable women, though Eilish wanted it to apply to exploited teenage boys as well. "Your Power" explores the topics of domestic abuse, sexual harassment, and statutory rape. Eilish warns in the chorus: "Try not to abuse your power/ I know we didn't choose to change/ You might not wanna lose your power/ But having it's so strange"; the last chorus replaces the final line with "but power isn't pain". The verses narrate an exploitative sexual relationship between a high school student and an older man that damages her self-perception. Four lines read: "Does it keep you in control?/ For you to keep her in a cage?/ And you swear you didn't know/ You said you thought she was your age." Eilish questions if the man feels any real sense of regret about the relationship.
Eilish stops talking in third person during two lines to discuss her own experiences with sexual abuse, having been conditioned to blame herself for someone else's "devil[ish]" behavior. She explained the lines by saying that abusers often blame the victim for their trauma and self-loathing, which in turn makes the victim blame themselves for what happened to them. In her view, victims should not feel embarrassed or responsible for the abusers' actions, especially if their brains have not fully developed and they cannot tell right from wrong. "Your Power" also references exploitative power dynamics in the music and film industries: "Will you only feel bad if it turns out/ That they kill your contract". According to her, however, the song is not solely about her or a specific person from the music industry who abused her, highlighting that the mishandling of authority is a ubiquitous phenomenon: "I would like people to listen to me. And not just try to figure out who I'm talking about[...] You might think, 'It's because she's in the music industry'—no, dude. It's everywhere."
Music video
Eilish directed the music video for "Your Power", which premiered the same day as the song's release. This marked the fourth time that she acted as director for her own music videos. Within one week of release, the video amassed over 50million views on YouTube.
The video, four minutes long, is set in a desert, specifically California's Simi Valley. It depicts Eilish on her own as she sings the lyrics on a mountainside and a drone camera slowly zooms in towards her. Later, an anaconda appears and slowly wraps itself around Eilish, as she utters the lines "Does it keep you in control? / For you to keep her in a cage?" An Entertainment Tonight author interpreted the scene as a metaphor for the constricting nature of mishandled authority. The camera zooms out and cuts to black as the anaconda tightens its grip around Eilish and the video comes to an end.
Becky Zhang of Los Angeles magazine commented on the similarities between the music videos for "Your Power" and for Britney Spears's "I'm Not A Girl, Not Yet a Woman" (2002). In terms of visuals, she compared the two based on their sepia color schemes, their panoramic cinematography, and their performers' being alone throughout the video. Zhang also drew parallels between the social contexts in which the videos were made, arguing that Eilish and Spears were asserting their agency and independence as teenage girls transitioning into young adult women in a society dominated by the male gaze.
Critical reception
Reviews Music critics praised "Your Power" for its candid and confrontational songwriting, underscoring the emotional impact of its critiques of abuse and the relevance of its lyrics to contemporary society. For Jackson Langford, writer at MTV Australia, the qualities that made the lyrics strong were its "clarity, conciseness and its inability to be interpreted in any other way than what was intended." In four-star reviews of the song, NME Rhian Daly and The Guardian Alexis Petridis argued that the juxtaposition between its message's impact and simple, straightforward nature made the lyrics memorable. Petridis compared the "matter-of-fact" nature of the chorus to "reminding someone to take their house keys with them" and concluded that this approach was intentional because powerful people should not have to be told not to abuse their positions of authority. Craig Jenkins wrote in Vulture: "She is all of us wondering why we must move heaven and earth for a crumb of common decency." Other critics found the lyricism in "Your Power" a testament to Eilish's songwriting skills, which Jason Lipshutz of Billboard thought was "underrated [and] overshadowed by the other facts of her superstardom".
Some music journalists also appreciated how Eilish portrayed abuse as a universal experience to which anyone can fall victim at any point in their life. They complimented the lyrics for combining personal anecdotes with other people's stories of abuse and political references to the ways abuse of power is perpetuated in a larger scale, such as how prominent figures in the music industry still hold a high degree of influence despite numerous allegations of workplace harassment. This led two critics to deem the song tantamount to a "real-life horror story", comparing it to the fictional, sinister narratives and "spooky" sounds of When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? One of them, Pitchfork Quinn Moreland, argued: "While Eilish's first album was full of overtly scary thoughts—stapled tongues, monsters under beds, teen suicide—the reality presented on 'Your Power' is profoundly more haunting." Several critics placed the song within the context of #MeToo, a social movement started by women to expose and counter sexual misconduct by men in positions of power. In the words of Rachel Brodsky of Uproxx: "Years after the #MeToo revolution of 2017, we're still having conversations about how the rich and powerful regularly abuse their authority. This is Billie's entry into the canon, with a painstakingly delicate track about[...] how we owe it to each other to change things for the better."