![]() ![]() It’s too close for comfort – so close it feels like she’s standing right behind you – and is the perfect distillation of Billie’s gift for catchiness and left-field experimentation. With grab-you-by-the-collar intensity, this warped, RnB-indebted beat, paired with Billie’s own hypnotic voice, gets right under your skin in all the best ways. Over a beat that creeps through from the darkness, for the first time inching towards the light, Billie’s quiet confessions and vulnerability about her experience with abuse and the trappings of fame sees her courageously cling, despite it all, to her belief in better days to come. It’s this kind of deft, razor-sharp wit that is both universal and hyper-specific that has elevated her to the generation-defining voice she has become. When Billie sang, “Things I once enjoyed just keep me employed now”, for many of us, it hit way too close to home. “ Sorry, sorry, I’m sorry, sorry / Sike“, she whispers, which you can’t help but think was a precursor for Eilish’s signature irreverence that would come to be immortalised by ‘bad guy’ (“Duh”). While she shows us she can play nicely, with her a measured cadence over twinkling piano keys, she is just as capable of snarling, “ Watch your back when you can’t watch mine” over a threatening beat that groans like a rusty switchblade. Confessional yet playful sensitive yet sneering, it captures a spectrum of contradictions that mystify us, and draw us further into her gothic world. ‘COPYCAT‘įew songs capture Eilish’s boundless range like ‘COPYCAT’. It’s a shining example of her tongue-in-cheek sense of humour, where nothing is ever quite as it seems. Her feather-light delivery is slow and indulgent, like a cat arching its back, as she delves into a world of obsession – which of course, for Eilish, is The Office which she samples in the song. ‘my strange addiction’ is what crawled out from an alternate universe where Pop Princesses was on dark mode, with lowkey eyeliner and a blithely gothic aura. The song is an underlining of self-worth her voice slips into a low purr as she glides through the song, unwrapping every word with care and cradling them for a moment, like the greatest gift she’d ever had was one she could only give to herself. When a tectonic dubstep bass drop catches you off guard at the end, which was originally written as a completely different song, it becomes clear that Billie Eilish is the sonic anarchist we’ve been waiting for.īillie is at her best in this all-too-radical ode to her future. She’s bored of you she’s bored of everyone. Her litany of whispered taunts (“ I’m that bad type/ Make your mama sad type / Make your girlfriend mad tight / Might seduce your dad type”) over a grisly electro beat is as infectious as it’s unsettling. Rolling her bored, listless eyes at the maximalist efforts of what has come before, ‘bad guy’ runs in the other direction, holding its own with the rest of them as if she’d hardly tried. ‘bad guy’ is the anthem of anti-pop, cementing Eilish’s rightful place as the ultimate iconoclast. You trip and tumble over a beat you can’t predict, as she playfully shape-shifts into a different nightmare. A blade is drawn, someone screams – who else is there, you find yourself asking, as the voices multiply. ![]() When Eilish sings “step on the glass”, you hear it shattering when she sings ‘staple your tongue’, there is a shock of a staple gun. She holds her listener by the collar from beginning to end, with her sleepy, serpentine hissings narrating our journey through a curdled dreamscape of textures. Eilish smudges vowels and crumbles consonants in her mouth, delighting in turning comfort into a crawlspace. An experiment in fear, she is the monster under your bed: a manifestation of the darkest corners of our subconscious. It feels almost reductive to call ‘bury a friend’ a track – far more than that, it’s a cinematic experience that captures Eilish at the peak of her powers. The best of her music – and believe me, the bar she sets herself is staggeringly high – shows the complexity of being not only a female musician, but a young woman, as prone to bouts of joy and despair, laughter and sincerity, as any other. I’ve taken my time to look at Eilish under a magnifying glass and trying to understand what, exactly, is that Billie Eilish vibe we all know, but struggle to put into words. She delights in subverting every long-held expectation of the genre: hers is a far sharper, meaner incarnation, which effortlessly exceeds her maximalist counterparts. Far beyond simply embodying the cultural zeitgeist, the 19-year-old has established herself as pop’s appointed antichrist.
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