billie eilish

the other day in Chicago I overheard some Actual Teens talking about Billie Eilish, and it's fairly uncommon for someone in the general alt-pop space to both be actually popular with actual young people who are not extremely online, and to make interesting music

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBRi6aZJGj4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=za8Ki4CCXgg

Saw her earlier this year at the Paradise in Boston and crowd was 95% under 18, super triple thrilled to be there and knew EVERY SINGLE WORD.

She has lots of really good tunes. "Idontwannabeyouanymore" is a classic.

Really liking the new single after what were a couple of misses for me. I like that she re-did that track w Vince Staples, but, thought it was trash compared to the album version.
Here's to hoping her love of hip-hop continues to get integrated better and better over time.

second of those much more promising than first

Thank you for starting this thread, katherine. I'm on board.

yeah, the second is my favorite thus far -- not so much in sound but in misanthropy it reminds me a lot of early laura marling

I think this one is the song I like best from her discog to date

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dVUmSgzgOqs

I love the attitude and conviction in these and that bass rumble in "you should see me in a crown" is >>>

My 11-year-old stepkid is obsessed with her - not bad! A lot better than most of the other pop stuff she listens to, and I'm not even sure where she first heard Billie Eilish since it doesn't seem like she gets much radio play? Is she on a kids'/teen show soundtrack somewhere?

"Lovely" with Khalid was on the 13 Reasons Why soundtrack

Hmm I haven't let her watch that show cause I don't think she's ready to handle the subject matter. She does listen to Khalid quite a bit though, so maybe just came across during a YouTube binge.

"you should see me in a crown" is v v good.

New song

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b6WNdcZpDhQ

i like that one. its video is grippingly dramatic

I noticed “when the party’s over” is in the top 20 of global spotify streams. What’s the story behind this? A movie/ad license? Was she famous prior to this single?

Check her play counts on Spotify. She's been quietly big for awhile.
She was already on her way at the time, but the track w Khalid really pushed her over.

she seems to be similar to halsey in that she's been able to build up a very large teenage following prior to scoring any proper radio hits

I've tried to ignore her for some time because of her idolisation of and connection to XXXtentacion, but I'm pretty taken with this latest single. There's a lot of The Love Club EP about it.

I've tried to ignore her for some time because of her idolisation of and connection to XXXtentacion

this is a thing with young artists I've just given up on because it increasingly seems like one would have to write off the entirety of current pop artists (and that's just based on what's known and out there, god knows how many collaborations were planned/scrapped)

oh i didn't know that re: x

guess i'm not surprised tho

New single is great:
https://youtu.be/xXFdnHiGwos

She keeps finding new wrinkles on what Billie EIlish songs are with all these singles. Great fun having her making so much music.

64th in the world on Spotify?
That's like Future (#60) level of fame. If "Fine China" or "Realer N Realer" don't take off, he's dust.

1 more popular than Juice WRLD (#65).

(Kids redacted) pic.twitter.com/wRF6TSLrBn

— Stephen malkmus (@dronecoma) December 11, 2018

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUHC9tYz8ik

debut album scheduled for release march 29th. i semi-consistently enjoy her new releases so i guess i'm anticipating it!

is it wild to say that this one almost reminds me of róisín circa ruby blue

ICYMI, this was pretty interesting

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cm0MGnuRnH0

is it wild to say that this one almost reminds me of róisín circa ruby blue

― monotony, Thursday, January 31, 2019 1:45 AM (three days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

not at all, it's very "night of the dancing flame"

Good call.

this songs pretty good and I like the production but the current trend of suicide ideation as a sign of artistic credibility annoys the fuck out of me

Michael, I notice that too. Inwards aggression.

billie could u not https://genius.com/Billie-eilish-wish-you-were-gay-lyrics

whatever u say abt her she's much better than lorde

Based on those lyrics that seems... implausible

i haven't spent much time with lorde's music really but that seems like a perfectly defensible position to me

I like Billie Eilish but wow that seems totally wrong to me.

Call me when she's released something as good as "The Louvre" or "Writer in the Dark".

no one in history has ever described what they like about "the louvre" without mentioning its sole memorable line

it's good tho so i feel bad for dissing it

i always thought lorde was insanely overrated (esp by press ppl eager to have a young woman star or w/e during peak poptimism) so i have something of a bias here...the amt of hype leading into her soph project was ridic considering how quickly it faded afterward

but to me billie eilish whatever her other faults sells u on her as a kind of auteur in a way i never got from lorde personally

I've tried listening a few times and I wish she should speak up a little more.

I'm getting to the point where I can't really even listen to anyone who seems like a rich kid

her music is dreck and the claim that she's better than lorde is simply outrageous

which artist's hit tune contains the line "i'm kind of over getting told to throw my hands up in the air, so there"

Yea the 'so there'part almost seems like it was written by a self mocking teenager - I think her lyrics have come on a fair bit since then

fwiw I think most of the songs in this thread are better than "the louvre" or "writer in the dark"

So this is like soundcloud rap but pop/r&b? Everything madd my teenagers now seems to have this overriding note of bleakness that’s different than merely “sad” or “angsty”. (Not a critique—an observation).

this is the first wave of new music that’s made me feel old and out of the loop.

I think musically lana del rey is a better reference point than lorde, btw, but this is coming from a slightly different emotional place. (love lana)

it is that overriding note of bleakness that makes one feel out of the loop. i got it with brockhampton too. it is the music of *prepares self for trenchant overload* people raised by smart technology rather than humans, and therein lies the bleakness

I don’t want to go too far in saying why this kind of music is resonating with people born after 1995 but it certainly is. i’m wondering what exactly the musical qualities are that i’m picking up on

I learned about Billie Ellish from the 9-year-old.

He probably found her not from TV or a movie, but through a combination of TikTok, YouTube and Roblox.

Meanwhile, my Discover Weekly playlist on Spotify thinks I need more Canned Heat in my life.

My discover weekly wants to firmly keep me mentally in 2007. All the comfort food indie of my college years plus a bit of tasteful postpunk for when I feel retro. Maybe spotify is trying to protect me from something.

The idea of a 9 year old liking a song like “when the party’s over” is baffling to me.

(i haven't listened to this)

wants to capture that ASMR audience

her audience loved that part where she pops out her retainer so much that she turned it into an entire concept album

I haven’t heard that particular sound (and I’ve listened on headphones), but Mr. B may have golden ears.

breihan piece reads like he’s recounting someone else describing the album to him, exaggerating the surface details

i hope low covers the title track

this is great, better than her debut

There's an approach here that is very similar on the surface to Lana Del Rey in terms of how both use a very similar flat-affect voice across all of their material but Eilish refracts through the different prisms set up by her various arrangements whereas Del Rey's music aggregates into an indistinguishable monolithic smear of grossness to me. Also, Eilish is better at connecting different colors/tones in her voice together than Del Rey; I have never gotten the "multiple homunculi fighting their way up her esophagus" vibe from Eilish that I regularly get from Del Rey.

I get the “controversial opinion” that this is the sort of album that gets interest solely for the huge impact the previous one had. Yeah, this album wouldn’t have had half the impact of the debut if they switch places, but I mean… duh? I love artists using the eye of the hurricane to rethink their careers and where they want to move forward and this clearly an album that comes after a hugely successful one and not the other way around. This is a burned out album of sorts.

Of sorts! "Things I once enjoyed/Just keep me employed now," in the very first track. Yeah, it's definitely an album that only exists in the afterburn of the first one. What I like about it lyrically is that there's a lot of confidence underlying the vulnerability, there's more well-earned impatience with assholes than self-pity.

the album is a little long but I'm not sure where I would trim it, and I much prefer it to the first one - her on-record identity seems much more fleshed-out, this one feels like listening to a real person instead of an outline of a personality. There's a few moments where some of production choices irriate me - the drums, particularly the hi-hats, seem to be a bit cheap and too loudly mixed.

I could see maybe losing tracks 8 and 9, if you wanted to trim it down... though those both feel pretty essential to the "project."

("Halley's Comet" is pretty, but the melody is distractingly reminiscent of "I Can't Help Falling in Love With You")

(...which is a lyrically apt reference, of course)

haha

I've played this album more often than the debut.

love this one so far

her first album was lyrically very much about being a teen who had a lot of online fame and hype but, really, still the experiences that implies

now it’s.. oh no, billie’s still had a limited world because you can’t just go out and do things as a famous teen, but you’re still a young person who loses track of friends and has shitty relationships, but you can’t step outside your house without getting hassled

or as I put it briefly, “ms. eilish has had more life experiences and didn’t like them very much”

her and lay dee goo gaw can go away now!

^"that shit's embarrassing"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kt-BMjO232I

title track live

I think the first song on this record is my favorite one.

It’s this wonderfully calibrated simmer/seethe, with an amazing range of emotions contained therein.

A showtune that’s also a hymn, a confessional booth session - if I were a director shooting a video I’d frame it like something from “The Real World,” which is why I’m not a music video director, of course

The production on “Lost Cause” is so sick. Those tinny, distant guitar strums… It’s like a deep, lost trip-hop track.

"GOLDWING" on my annual mixtape, it's an earworm

Oh, she just turned 20. She has really good influences but they are old ! (Even though the sound is very 90s) I thought of the fucking Beatles on the first track.
On first listen, Oxytocin, Goldwing, Your Power (I feel like I've heard that vocal line before though) and Therefore I Am stand out for me.
I wish she rebalanced her singing even more in favour of clean singing and giving her voice more space rather than keep this focus on every trembling syllable, I get that it's part of her identity as a singer but I find it a bit gimmicky and grating over a whole album and she doesn't really need it anymore to demarcate herself. The rest of her vocal arsenal is much more powerful.

I was kinda surprised at how naturally charismatic and game she was on SNL. I mean yeah pop-star-is-good-on-camera shocker, but I guess it's been a minute since I've seen her (outside of a performance) and was expecting the kind of awkward, slightly stoned, slightly gloomy, alt teen presence she had earlier on.

Anyway, she rules. Most likable popstar.

I watched bits of the SNL stuff, and I agree she was unexpectedly charismatic and low-key "charming" on camera. Kind of a young Juliette Lewis vibe (or something). I find many of today's pop stars to be fairly "likeable," FWIW.

I think the use of social media really helps modern popstars to not be live in a bubble all of the time. Back then the connection was almost strictly via mainstream media doing all the discourse and they couldn’t really connect directly with any of their fans or have much to say.

Now they can be silent observers on what fans are liking or not liking about anything they do and correct course immediately if they think it’s a fair criticism. It’s also a much comfortable option for pop artists with a bit of an introverted side to them like Billie Eilish.

Many people think of social media as a very toxic environment but tbh I think what we had before was way worse.

the doco "The World's a Little Blurry" is about twice as long as it should be, but is insightful and unfussed, and Billie's commitment to her art and her fans is quite remarkable. Seems to have maintained her authentic self despite the six-orders-of-magnitude growth of her fanbase and reach. Well worth a watch.

Her SNL monologue began with a joke about why she used to wear baggy clothes; and ended with her saying that she “spent years pretending to be someone I’m not”(?) (I don’t remember her exact words). I was a little surprised by that deliberate about-face (if I’m interpreting it right). OTOH, sometimes a joke is just a joke…

“I didn’t change my number” is becoming one of my favorite things in here.

On her previous album I felt the singles were the strongest material, this time around I feel like the best tracks of this album weren’t released as singles (I didn’t change my number, lost cause, oxytocin, goldwing…)

Lost Cause was a single!

Oh fuck you’re right. I hate that music video/song combo so I erased it from my mind.

She has a new 2-song EP out, Guitar Songs... it's good.

it's great!

She played "TV" live as a duet with her brother when i saw her recently. i thought it was the one slight weak point of the set but it is much better recorded.

She was st the Dodgers v Giants game tonight in LA. Drop a single, go to a game.

Only TV is on YouTube and it was good.

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/billie-eilish-dance-cam-bad-guy-dodgers-game-1386733/

Billie Eilish was dancing to her own song at Dodger Stadium 😂 💃 pic.twitter.com/OQjA6zZ7VA

— SportsCenter (@SportsCenter) July 22, 2022

https://autos.yahoo.com/billie-eilish-achieves-dance-cam-124811897.html

2-song EP

this is literally not extended

went to post the crossed arms smiley but functional image search is a thing of the past

2-song EP

this is literally not extended

I'm tempted to quibble about that: the "extended" in EP surely means extended compared to a single, and as nowadays singles generally are one-track releases (rather than the misnamed doubles of yore), I guess a two-track EP is within reason?

lmao who gives even the slightest fuck

Apparently her 2018 cover of Drake’s “Hotline Bling” has been getting TikTok heat; so she released an edit that’s only the second half (without the actual lyric/vocal)? Pretty random…

Btw – i’ve posted this elsewhere, but it’s one of my favorite tracks this year so far:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lVCNgOi4kFg

The hotline edit was released because that’s the portion of the song trending on twitter and I guess they wanted to monetize on it. Weird to only upload a portion though… I assume you pay less royalties?

Yeah I wondered if that portion doesn’t technically incorporate any of the songwriting on the Drake song…

songwriters listed as drake, paul jefferies (drake's producer) and timmy thomas (as sampled in drake's hotline bling)

but there is still money to be made from those millions of streams the song will undoubtably get

But how many times will people listen to a minute-long slice of ambience? I'm sure a million ppl will stream it once (like I did)... but if it were the full song, it would end up on playlists etc. And if the songwriters get paid anyway...

I'm sure there's a logic, it's just opaque to me – they didn't even include the full title in the track name.

my guess as to why they released this “version” is because billie doesn’t actually like the full cover & didn’t want it officially released and turned into a whole thing. if it’s from 2018 then she was prob 15 when she made it, it feels likely to me that she’s sheepish/embarrassed by it being revived out of nowhere 6 years later by tik tok & so she gave her label the okay to monetize the version that basically sounds like… nothing

i don’t think there’s any business reason why you would do it this way. a copyright is a copyright you don’t get to pay less if you only release a 59 second song

Sure, I just thought maybe that section was entirely disconnected from the original song; to the point they could slice it off and treat it as a separate composition... thus also the truncated title... obv not the case though!