 |
· · ·
California is burning.
The world is burning too, yes, but the golden state has been burning hotter, and for far longer. Palm trees and scorching concrete and stretches and stretches of pristine beach are all choked with sour smoke.
It seems inevitable that all the muck swirling through the air would condense and congeal into one form or another.
It seems less than inevitable that she would pop out her retainer, clear her throat and introduce herself:
“[I'm the] Make your mama sad type /
Make your girlfriend mad type /
Might seduce your dad type”
“I’m the bad guy” — and then, with inimitable teenage scorn (and perfect comedic timing) appends, “— duh…”
What follows can only be described as the musical equivalent of Billie Eilish finger-gunning her way out of the room.
With such keen pop instincts and an instantly recognisable knifepoint rasp, she clearly follows the trail blazed by ur-teen Lorde on her superlative sophomore album Melodrama — whose praises I will never stop singing — at least, until swerving sharply left into gothic territory. If you squint, When We All Fall Asleep could be the splendid Melodrama, repainted in shades of black. At once spacious and claustrophobic, Billie splices together crushing seabed-dark basslines and pricks and clicks and snaps of light that pop like cracked knuckles through the gloom.
Melodrama shone its brilliant hypersaturated reality up to the heavens, but the sky hangs low and dark over the twisting architectures of When We All Fall Asleep.
“Bite my glass, set myself on fire /
Can’t you tell I’m crass? /
Can’t you tell I’m wired? /
Tell me nothing lasts /
Like I don’t know”
Lorde shared every painful detail of her first love, from liquor-wet lime to broken glass painted red and chrome across the road, to demonstrate her thesis: that she is like everyone else, and to demonstrate the corollary at the core of the pop star: that everyone else is like her. But Billie has that particular teen way of thinking that only she sees the truth, that unlike the brainwashed masses, only she is real.
Only she is honest enough to hit where it hurts —
“I was hoping you’d come home /
I don’t care if it’s a lie”
— blunt enough to follow through —
“Tell me love is endless /
Don’t be so pretentious /
Leave me like you do”
— lingering in the intoxicating intersection between self-hatred and self-obsession —
“I love you and I don’t want to”
— and there are few people who could snarl a line like, “you should see me in a crown”, while still bringing out each nuance of every word.
If that sounds a little like MySpace emo poetry but actually really damn good, you have hit upon her exact aesthetic. Poisonous words scribbled down in the margins of a school notebook, decorated with skulls and flowers, then sculpted and streamlined into sleek, silvery pop.
“Bad, bad news /
One of us is gonna lose /
I’m the powder, you’re the fuse /
Just add some friction”
She walks the walk, she sings the sings, and she wrings actual emotional resonance out of long-dry lyrical reservoirs:
“All the good girls go to hell /
‘Cause even God herself has enemies /
And once the water starts to rise /
And heaven’s out of sight /
She’ll want the devil on her team”
And, impossibly, Billie is even younger than the preposterously precocious Lorde. She belongs to a generation which for better and for worse has known no privacy, no protection and no boundaries. A generation that, correctly, knows that their innermost thoughts and feelings are worth recording and packaging and broadcasting to the world at large.
To wit, the definitions of genre are fluid, each one a dish of salt or butter or dried peppers to be plucked from as the music, not the market, demands.
There’s a moment in ‘Bury a Friend’ where the song drops away to a single buzzing subbassline, then lets even that fall into dead silence, that echoes the muffled rattlings of Lorde’s ‘The Louvre’, which so strongly evoke staring into your own eyes in a club’s bathroom mirror. ‘You Should See Me In a Crown’ too breaks into an epileptic flicker, like fluorescent lighting reacting to the presence of some unknowable monster.
It’s moments like these that pay homage to the institutional memory of pop music. Almost a decade on from the peak of dubstep, its ripples are still stretching out from the epicentre of Skrillex, shallower but no less perceptible.
While everything about her appearance — the thousand-yard stare, the megawatt pout, the supernatural pallette of hair dye — suggests punkish counterculture, but there is much of the metallic in her music. Metal bands that seek to terrify, which they do, if not in the way they intend. You can’t sense subtle tweaks in temperature and shifts in mood, can’t hold up a thumb to the prevailing breeze when you’re torn apart in a hurricane of screams and sludge. As always, there are exceptions: the rosy hues of Deafheaven, who somehow evoke the storm while placing the listener outside of it; the piercingly beautiful Periphery interludes, each an oasis of horizon within harsh angles that rip and tear.
Billie does not operate at eleven. She seldom crests a five. But it’s the quiet that draws you in, sets you on edge. It’s the quiet that sends a chill creeping into your ears and up your spine, soaking into your mind.
A lower energy suspends When We All Fall Asleep in a state of constant menace. Why electrocute when jolts and jabs are far more fun?
It’s to Billie’s credit that she reaped from Melodrama only what made her stronger — that album’s soaring contour complimented Lorde’s arch girl-next-door vibe, but would have broken the surly throughline of When We All Fall Asleep.
Darlingly macabre and bitterly practical, this album is shooting for the cold black stars. Billie flips on a dime between menace and vulnerability, and rides to the hilt her hypnotic flair for drama. While Lorde embodied the teenage girl as the glowing centre of her own wonderful, terrible world, Billie is the teenage girl as outcast, misunderstood as achingly ruthless.
“What do you want from me? Why don’t you run from me? /
What are you wondering? What do you know?/
Why aren’t you scared of me? Why do you care for me? /
When we all fall asleep, where do we go?”
There is no joy here, but there is something else. Billie may not understand what she’s feeling, and she certainly couldn’t accept it if she did, but it’s still there, small and grey and hard: hope.
The world is burning too, yes, but the golden state has been burning hotter, and for far longer. Palm trees and scorching concrete and stretches and stretches of pristine beach are all choked with sour smoke.
It seems inevitable that all the muck swirling through the air would condense and congeal into one form or another.
It seems less than inevitable that she would pop out her retainer, clear her throat and introduce herself:
“[I'm the] Make your mama sad type /
Make your girlfriend mad type /
Might seduce your dad type”
“I’m the bad guy” — and then, with inimitable teenage scorn (and perfect comedic timing) appends, “— duh…”
What follows can only be described as the musical equivalent of Billie Eilish finger-gunning her way out of the room.
With such keen pop instincts and an instantly recognisable knifepoint rasp, she clearly follows the trail blazed by ur-teen Lorde on her superlative sophomore album Melodrama — whose praises I will never stop singing — at least, until swerving sharply left into gothic territory. If you squint, When We All Fall Asleep could be the splendid Melodrama, repainted in shades of black. At once spacious and claustrophobic, Billie splices together crushing seabed-dark basslines and pricks and clicks and snaps of light that pop like cracked knuckles through the gloom.
Melodrama shone its brilliant hypersaturated reality up to the heavens, but the sky hangs low and dark over the twisting architectures of When We All Fall Asleep.
“Bite my glass, set myself on fire /
Can’t you tell I’m crass? /
Can’t you tell I’m wired? /
Tell me nothing lasts /
Like I don’t know”
Lorde shared every painful detail of her first love, from liquor-wet lime to broken glass painted red and chrome across the road, to demonstrate her thesis: that she is like everyone else, and to demonstrate the corollary at the core of the pop star: that everyone else is like her. But Billie has that particular teen way of thinking that only she sees the truth, that unlike the brainwashed masses, only she is real.
Only she is honest enough to hit where it hurts —
“I was hoping you’d come home /
I don’t care if it’s a lie”
— blunt enough to follow through —
“Tell me love is endless /
Don’t be so pretentious /
Leave me like you do”
— lingering in the intoxicating intersection between self-hatred and self-obsession —
“I love you and I don’t want to”
— and there are few people who could snarl a line like, “you should see me in a crown”, while still bringing out each nuance of every word.
If that sounds a little like MySpace emo poetry but actually really damn good, you have hit upon her exact aesthetic. Poisonous words scribbled down in the margins of a school notebook, decorated with skulls and flowers, then sculpted and streamlined into sleek, silvery pop.
“Bad, bad news /
One of us is gonna lose /
I’m the powder, you’re the fuse /
Just add some friction”
She walks the walk, she sings the sings, and she wrings actual emotional resonance out of long-dry lyrical reservoirs:
“All the good girls go to hell /
‘Cause even God herself has enemies /
And once the water starts to rise /
And heaven’s out of sight /
She’ll want the devil on her team”
And, impossibly, Billie is even younger than the preposterously precocious Lorde. She belongs to a generation which for better and for worse has known no privacy, no protection and no boundaries. A generation that, correctly, knows that their innermost thoughts and feelings are worth recording and packaging and broadcasting to the world at large.
To wit, the definitions of genre are fluid, each one a dish of salt or butter or dried peppers to be plucked from as the music, not the market, demands.
There’s a moment in ‘Bury a Friend’ where the song drops away to a single buzzing subbassline, then lets even that fall into dead silence, that echoes the muffled rattlings of Lorde’s ‘The Louvre’, which so strongly evoke staring into your own eyes in a club’s bathroom mirror. ‘You Should See Me In a Crown’ too breaks into an epileptic flicker, like fluorescent lighting reacting to the presence of some unknowable monster.
It’s moments like these that pay homage to the institutional memory of pop music. Almost a decade on from the peak of dubstep, its ripples are still stretching out from the epicentre of Skrillex, shallower but no less perceptible.
While everything about her appearance — the thousand-yard stare, the megawatt pout, the supernatural pallette of hair dye — suggests punkish counterculture, but there is much of the metallic in her music. Metal bands that seek to terrify, which they do, if not in the way they intend. You can’t sense subtle tweaks in temperature and shifts in mood, can’t hold up a thumb to the prevailing breeze when you’re torn apart in a hurricane of screams and sludge. As always, there are exceptions: the rosy hues of Deafheaven, who somehow evoke the storm while placing the listener outside of it; the piercingly beautiful Periphery interludes, each an oasis of horizon within harsh angles that rip and tear.
Billie does not operate at eleven. She seldom crests a five. But it’s the quiet that draws you in, sets you on edge. It’s the quiet that sends a chill creeping into your ears and up your spine, soaking into your mind.
A lower energy suspends When We All Fall Asleep in a state of constant menace. Why electrocute when jolts and jabs are far more fun?
It’s to Billie’s credit that she reaped from Melodrama only what made her stronger — that album’s soaring contour complimented Lorde’s arch girl-next-door vibe, but would have broken the surly throughline of When We All Fall Asleep.
Darlingly macabre and bitterly practical, this album is shooting for the cold black stars. Billie flips on a dime between menace and vulnerability, and rides to the hilt her hypnotic flair for drama. While Lorde embodied the teenage girl as the glowing centre of her own wonderful, terrible world, Billie is the teenage girl as outcast, misunderstood as achingly ruthless.
“What do you want from me? Why don’t you run from me? /
What are you wondering? What do you know?/
Why aren’t you scared of me? Why do you care for me? /
When we all fall asleep, where do we go?”
There is no joy here, but there is something else. Billie may not understand what she’s feeling, and she certainly couldn’t accept it if she did, but it’s still there, small and grey and hard: hope.