Billie Eilish - Ocean Eyes

A girl who seemed to come from nowhere, with a restless and unsettling air, her gaze fixed in the void, blank and indecipherable. Hair dyed a different colour every time. Youthful yet enigmatic outfits, and theatrical stagings that speak of nightmares and night terrors. A voice that is often a whisper rather than a scream. Billie Eilish Pirate Baird O'Connell, born in 2001, is the perfect example of how Generation Z (those born, by convention, between 1995 and 2005) collided head-on with the changes in the music industry and the media during the 2010s. A new kind of popstar, utterly different from her older colleagues of previous generations: a girl of her own time, raised at the centre of the world (in Los Angeles), amid an ongoing revolution in communications that she herself does not claim to understand, but which causes her — as it does many of her age — various mental health issues since childhood.

Plagued by anxiety, sleep paralysis and suicidal tendencies, Billie (everyone simply calls her that) grows up in a family of artists, miraculously protected and encouraged within the ultra-competitive environment of Los Angeles. Her parents are both actors (her mother even appears in an episode of "Friends"), and her older brother Finneas, her faithful companion on stage and in the studio (as well as co-writer of most of her songs), is also an actor and musician, having appeared in "Glee" and proving himself more than capable as a producer too. It is he who, when the girl decides to give up dancing at a young age, "gifts" her the single "Ocean Eyes", which becomes Billie Eilish's true breakthrough once uploaded to SoundCloud in 2015.

Billie is just a teenager, and like many of her age she finds herself swept up in what would soon be dubbed bedroom pop: music made in one's own "bedroom" by very young artists who choose to self-produce without the backing of labels, promoters, producers or agents. With the new digital technologies of the mid-2010s, it had by then become easy to write, play and record music in one's own room, provided you had a decent laptop and software like GarageBand.

Naturally, the means available are what they are: indeed, most bedroom pop production (a genre that seems to have withered away with the end of the last decade) is typically lo-fi, often built on acoustic guitars (if you're recording in your bedroom you can't make too much noise, or the neighbours will complain) and dreamy, psychedelic tones. "Ocean Eyes" can be linked to this genre, but its rarefied, atmospheric arrangement draws heavily from dream pop too. The track is delicate and poignant, with an enchanting, poetic refrain: “Non è giusto, non sono mai caduta da così in alto/ Caduta dentro i tuoi occhi d’oceano”. And it wins everyone over.

Don't Smile At Me

And this is only the beginning: Billie's popularity, driven by her rebellious teenage attitude that is at the same time sharp and intelligent, grows rapidly, and a series of new singles quickly win over an ever-wider audience. Already in 2016 her debut EP, Don't Smile At Me (a title that speaks volumes), made songs like "Watch" and "Bellyache" famous. The first is an indie-pop track with seemingly carefree tones that in fact conceals rather psychotic revenge fantasies: “Siederò e guarderò la tua auto che brucia/ Con il fuoco che hai acceso in me, e non sei mai tornato indietro a chiedermi di spegnere”. The second is an indie-folk song inspired by a certain strand of female singer-songwriters from the 2010s, which in the refrain is decorated with heavy bass and 808s. This track too presents an unsettling image (and, as we'll see, this will only intensify throughout the singer's career): “I miei amici non sono lontani/ Nel bagagliaio dell’auto/ Giacciono i loro corpi”.

Billie sings mainly about the disappointments brought by love and life, but she does so with a bitterness and unease that wouldn't normally be associated with an artist her age: she is a far cry from the cheerful choruses offered up by the teen popstars of the past, and perhaps that is exactly what keeps drawing more and more listeners to discover her. Her songs are filled with expressions of disillusionment and dark visions evoking traumatic scenarios, and the young star constantly oscillates between fleeing the hypocrisies of the reality of her time and fearing the horrors lurking in her own mind. As a result, her songs take on a strong, atypical character, not simply tailored to the demands of the record market but particularly attuned to the needs of the more fragile, withdrawn, restless among us. The Los Angeles singer's music hits exactly the right target in an era in which mental health issues are ever more widespread, yet at the same time far less stigmatised.

The strength of her music naturally owes a great deal to the refined arrangements crafted with Finneas in her bedroom, a space that becomes a genuine recording studio within the family home. Safe within that environment, the two are able to translate Billie's nightmares into music with grotesque, restless, dreamlike tones. There's a bit of indie-pop, a bit of singer-songwriter sensibility, a bit of what we've called bedroom pop, but also a strong influence from mainstream chart pop (Billie has openly admitted to a literally obsessive passion for Justin Bieber) and from rap, a leading genre on the American scene (the brilliant and unpredictable Tyler The Creator is cited by the singer as one of her key inspirations).

The young Californian artist's success grows slowly but steadily throughout 2017, and while the EP brings her increasing recognition, her name becomes known in many different circles. Helping her cause is the composition of "Bored", honestly not one of her best tracks, for the soundtrack of the Netflix cult series "13 Reasons Why"; and a feature with famous rapper Vince Staples on the track "&Burn", which is nothing more than a remix of the earlier "Watch" with an added rap verse featuring the celebrated artist. Her rise continues in 2018 as Billie keeps winning over the world of hip hop and R&B, releasing a cover of Drake's "Hotline Bling" and teaming up with Khalid, another well-known name on the scene, for the soundtrack of the second season of "13 Reasons Why" with "Lovely", one of her biggest hits up to that point.

You Should See Me in a Crown

Up until roughly the middle of 2018, Billie Eilish is still just another teenage singer making her debut like countless others. Things change when ongoing studio experiments with her brother, combined with a fierce determination to stand out on the scene, lead to the single “You Should See Me In A Crown”. It's a breaking point: the American singer suddenly sets herself apart from all her peers as someone whose provocations dare to go further; she understands that old and new media alike need to be "pierced" together, with hard-hitting content and a relentlessly sarcastic, anti-celebratory attitude that both rides and undercuts the power of "hype". And indeed Billie leads the charge for a generation of new musicians who integrate and even favor the 4.0 dimension - social media, Spotify, streaming platforms, YouTube, viral TikTok videos - over traditional promotion and artistic practice. It's a multimedia, fluid, ever-shifting conception of making and being in music, one that works especially well when paired with ideas that literally break through the screen, in the sense that they spark such fascination in the audience that they conquer multiple screens, displays and eyes at once. And you don't necessarily need revolutionary ideas to do it.

In the video for “You Should See Me In A Crown”, suffice it to say, Billie literally has spiders crawling across her face. The song takes on the same stripped-down, alternative character: an unsettling anti-chorus over an electronic backbone announces the young star's new musical direction, and before long people start talking about dark-pop, a genre that could arguably be traced right back to this track. In truth, as with all labels applied to music (grunge, for instance), it's an approximate term at best. The boundaries of this style are hard to pin down, but it's safe to say it had already been anticipated by Lana Del Rey in her melancholic side, and by Grimes in terms of experimentation, hyper-pop and anti-pop tones, and a certain underlying sarcasm. Either way, Eilish becomes its leading face.

The song's lyrics reveal a deeply cynical Billie, who mocks her own audience and the idol status fans have bestowed on her, essentially arguing that if they could see her true nature they wouldn't be so enthusiastic about her: “Dovreste vedermi incoronata/ Governerò questa città da nulla/ Guardatemi come li faccio inchinare, uno dopo l’altro”. And, foreshadowing the dominant imagery of an entire phase of her career - one that begins right here - she doesn't shy away from conjuring horror scenarios: “Conto le mie carte, li guardo cadere/ Sangue su un muro di marmo/ Mi piace il modo in cui tutti loro gridano”. Completing the picture is a second, anime-inspired video directed by Japanese artist Takashi Murakami, in which the singer morphs directly into a spider-like monster.

The Places of Sleep

Billie's true breakthrough comes in 2019 with the release of her first blockbuster album, When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? Buoyed by the popularity of pitch-perfect, high-impact new singles like “Bad Guy” (the genuine earworm of that year), “When The Party's Over” and “Bury A Friend”, the record sweeps up award after award; its success is confirmed by Billie's performance at Coachella 2019, met with an electrifying response; and at the 2020 Grammy Awards the album cements brother and sister once and for all as icons at the very centre of the music scene.

Billie Eilish's first official album is a thoroughly dark-pop record, with gloomy, at times melancholic tones and moments of outright grotesquerie. The linchpin of the tracklist is obviously “Bury A Friend”, a song in which the singer vividly describes her nocturnal terrors and the tight bond between sleep and death; and the disturbing video, some insist, contains satanic references. It's a dark track, built entirely on low, ethereal sounds, half-whispered phrases and the atmosphere of a nightmarish nursery rhyme. The chorus, grotesque and existential, is justly famous: “Che cosa vuoi da me/ Perché non scappi da me/ Che cosa immagini/ Che cosa sai/ Perché non hai paura di me/ Perché ti importa di me/ Quando andiamo a dormire, tutti quanti/ Dove andiamo a finire?”.

The interweaving of the album's two central themes, sleep and death, is also underscored by far more explicit references (“I wanna end me”; and “I honestly thought I'd be dead by now”) and shapes the entire concept behind the record, cover art included: Billie appears on it lying on a bed like some malevolent presence, her pupils entirely white like a demon's. The bed as metonymy is picked up again in her live shows, where, through an effective bit of stagecraft, the singer climbs onto an actual bed that is raised up as if by supernatural forces, and keeps performing within this metaphor of surreal suspension.

“When The Party's Over”, another pivotal track on the record, is a bleak piano ballad that tackles loneliness and stands out for its exquisite vocal arrangements. In the famous video, Billie drinks from a bitter goblet filled with a strange black liquid, and slowly begins to cry tears of the same colour before dissolving into a large puddle of the same substance. Legend has it the siblings rehearsed the song's opening ninety times, which gives some idea of the perfectionism driving their modus operandi.

Then, of course, there's “Bad Guy”, a track with an obsessive hook that pokes fun at the figure of the "tough guy" - man, woman, or anyone else - dismantling it like some circus sideshow (and indeed the sounds, especially the millennial whoop in the chorus, conjure up a carnival atmosphere): Billie and Finneas know that, deep down, everyone has their weaknesses. The track quickly becomes the singer's biggest hit, winning everyone over with its hypnotic hook and driving rhythm. It remains, perhaps to this day, her most sarcastic and satirical song, and is certainly the one everybody knows, whether heard on the radio, on TV, or in some advert. It's also through this song's video that Billie burns herself into the public's visual memory: blue hair, a vacant stare, baggy clothes (she would later describe this style - part streetwear, part high fashion - with the umbrella term bhlosh) and a freely adolescent attitude.

The tracklist also features the ironic, loping “I Wish You Were Gay”, a provocation designed in part to rile up homophobes, and “My Strange Addiction”, which samples various lines from the cult series "The Office" (of which the singer is a big fan).

Overall, the album is anchored throughout by low, vibrating sounds, restrained but cutting vocals, and deep, provocative lyrics. The anti-pop (rather than dark-pop) nature of every track inevitably reflects both the safe, enclosed climate of the siblings' production in their bedroom studio and the tensions that Billie and Finneas try to stir up in every song.

The album's success is followed by a string of prestigious moments, such as the honour of writing the official theme song for “No Time To Die” (the track, as always, shares its title), the final Daniel Craig-era 007 film. The composition is recorded together with maestro Hans Zimmer, the guru behind the soundtracks of major film productions, and for the occasion another giant is brought in on guitar: Johnny Marr of the Smiths.

Everything I Wanted

But fame and success bring pressure and uncertainty along with them: out of this comes the deeply personal single “Everything I Wanted”, which speaks openly about suicide while reflecting on what really matters in life. A gently rhythmic, delicate track that conveys fragility: in the video the two siblings drive a car seemingly without destination, and finally, unexpectedly, plunge into the ocean, carrying on along the seabed toward an ending tinged horribly with relief.

In 2020 the pandemic hits, and like every musician Billie makes the most of the long, tense, boredom-filled hours of lockdown to write a huge number of new songs, while also juggling several other projects: she gets involved in fashion, for instance, endorsing products aimed at young people but always with an eye on a conscious, strongly progressive ethics. She's a declared Democrat voter (in 2020 she openly backed Joe Biden against Donald Trump), she sounds the alarm on global warming ("All The Good Girls Go To Hell", another single from the first album, deals exactly with this), and she's vegan and an advocate for animal rights.

In her short film “Not My Responsibility” (later released as a single from the new album) she delivers a long statement against body-shaming, something she's been a victim of for years on Instagram, like all celebrities — especially female ones. She just manages to perform it live before the first lockdown (which abruptly cuts short her tour), appearing in the clip stripping down to her underwear while simultaneously "disappearing" into water, on an inevitably black surface. The crux of the song is summed up in these lines: “Il mio valore è basato solo sulla tua percezione?/ O la tua opinione di me non è mia responsabilità?” A crucial reflection on survival in the age of social media.

This kind of thinking, geared toward philosophical as well as personal growth, leads to "My Future". Released in the summer of 2020, it's arguably the first genuinely upbeat Billie Eilish song, with more acoustic sounds and hints of jazz, accompanied by an animated video that encourages resilience and self-discovery. In it, Billie walks like a comic-book character, moving through a forest in the rain, and in a metaphor for radical yet positive change she ends up merging with the surrounding nature, as the rain stops and the sun finally comes out.

Happier than ever

In 2021 the second album arrives, Happier Than Ever, which offers sounds more reflective, meditative and deep than one might expect. There are no sure-fire, easy hit singles like on the previous record, and it's already possible to talk less about dark-pop (the genre, like bedroom pop, more or less fades within a few years; though it's still too early to declare it dead). Billie and Finneas write bass music tracks that remain dark in tone but leave plenty of room for acoustic and analog instrumental touches, revealing a much more singer-songwriter-like, adult sensibility. It helps, of course, that in the meantime the singer has come of age.

While the concept of the first album revolved around the idea of sleep and nightmares in a quasi-horror vein, this second record takes as its main point of reflection the ups-and-downs of success and fame.

The single “Your Power” introduces, in the new year, the unprecedented image of a blonde, more grown-up Billie. In the song's video, set in the Californian desert, the singer lets herself be wrapped by a snake to deliver a powerful message against the abuse of power and the exercise of control — of one person over another, perhaps through psychotic, toxic, passive-aggressive dynamics, but also of authority over the individual, a particularly raw topic in the United States after the death of George Floyd just a year earlier.

The tracklist also features the powerful “Oxytocin”, with its deliberately tech-house sound, telling a story of sin and damnation; it's the most dance-oriented, rhythmically driven track on the album, a striking exception in an otherwise very subdued, reflective tracklist, if we exclude perhaps the cryptic Idm moment of “Goldwing”.

There's also room for the female-empowerment anthem “Therefore I Am”, a great sarcastic electropop commentary that takes the famous Cartesian motto as its starting point to reflect on the condition of women, who exist in their own right and are not defined by their relationships with men. It's a recurring kind of reflection in the artist's music, one that also mirrors the demands of the post-#MeToo era, strongly focused on securing a finally modern, emancipated status for women. As a young female pop star, Billie Eilish is directly implicated. Also notable is “NDA” (short for “Non-Disclosure Agreement”), another central song in the concept, which accurately captures the alienating needs of famous people desperately trying to hold on to some shred of privacy.

Taken as a whole, the tracklist of the second album is another great commentary on the times, this time expressed with greater maturity and less of a provocative edge, with an impact felt more by an adult audience than by teenagers perpetually on the hunt for the next viral phenomenon.

In the wake of the release of these two albums, the Los Angeles singer stands out as one of the most alternative figures on the pop scene. An idol to her generation but an anti-idol by the standards of commercial music, she keeps pushing for atypical musical productions that reshape mainstream taste and pack in as many messages and calls for reflection as possible, without betraying the need for danceable, melodic, hummable sounds capable of topping the charts (the Spotify streaming charts, that is).

The third strike

Billie Eilish's return with her third album, Hit Me Hard And Soft (2024), is marked by a necessary maturation paired with a musical and stylistic growth that's both disruptive and, at the same time, delicately woven. Still working alongside her ever-faithful brother Finneas, with whom she co-wrote these new ten songs, Billie O'Connell experiments, explores and broadens her sonic range, leaving behind the image of her rebellious, anxiety- and insecurity-ridden teenage self and stepping into a far more adult version of herself.

This direction was actually not unforeseeable: it could already be glimpsed in the softer, more intimate traits of the second album, Happier Than Ever, and also in more recent releases like “What Was I Made For?”, the Oscar-winning song featured on the soundtrack of Greta Gerwig's “Barbie”.

On the new record, three distinctive traits define the more "adult" Billie: one, far more intricate compositions; two, greater vocal expressiveness; three, a shift toward more acoustic and eclectic sounds.

As for the first point, we're dealing with songs that have a more intricate structure, in which Billie and Finneas show themselves to be rather impatient with the classic verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus formula. There's the three-part "Bittersuite", for instance (an obvious play on the word "bittersweet"), a brief sweet-and-sour anthology, fittingly; the elegant "L'Amour De Ma Vie", which starts out as a refined track à la "Michelle" but shifts halfway through into 2010s-style synth sounds, drifting toward what sounds like nostalgia for a "younger" Billie, autotune included; and the anguished closer "Blue", which sets off as a firmly rhythmic track only to sink into more reflective, muted sounds, closing the album on an enigmatic note.

All of this is accompanied – points two and three – by a use of the voice that's now much more open to melisma and trills, less reliant on whispers and high notes locked into fixed note sequences, and by arrangements that lean toward rock and jazz influences while still leaving room for other things, as in the surprising power ballad "The Greatest", itself very 2010s in its chorus, or in the dark-pop of "The Diner".

"Birds Of A Feather" betrays the clear influence of Taylor Swift (perhaps the "Folklore" (2020) era), long a declared point of reference for Billie. "Lunch", on the other hand, is maybe the only slightly provocative track, this album's "Bad Guy" if you will, in which Billie expresses, quite explicitly if still through metaphor, her appreciation for a girl: "Mangerei quella ragazza per pranzo/ Lei balla sulla mia lingua". Lines like this one also reveal the more adult, emancipated perspective the American singer now brings to her subject matter, themes that in turn take her far from both the post-adolescent crises voiced on her first album – suicidal thoughts, horror-movie dreams, nightmares of death – and the pressures stemming from the weight of fame on her second – body-shaming, privacy, anxiety about the future.

On this third album, Billie finally seems able to let go, enjoying her fame and her relationships, talking about love and feelings in a far freer, far less negative way. The lyrics say so, more open to welcoming outside affection, and the arrangements confirm it, decisively geared toward more upbeat moods and much less inclined toward introspection built on subdued rhythms and pumped-up bass. The fears and insecurities of the teenage Billie, who found worldwide success at 17, now filter into what can at most be called a wistful melancholy in the vein of Lana Del Rey, though one that often and willingly gives way to bursts of pure positive energy. Gone are the aggression of an "Oxytocin" (2021), the sarcasm of an "I Wish You Were Gay" (2019) or the resentment of a "Watch" (2017).

In their place are the composed, reflective and at times dazzling sounds of an artist in the process of maturing, discovering her songwriting side with genuine curiosity, stretching the boundaries of her own possibilities and, at the same time, testing her audience. Because while it's true that at least two or three songs – say "Lunch", "Birds Of A Feather" and "The Diner" – would work well as singles, maybe with decent music videos and even "on the radio" as people used to say, it's equally true that much of the tracklist will prove particularly tough going for the Californian artist's longtime fans, in keeping with the famously stripped-down promotional strategy adopted for the album: just one announcement, no singles, and a handful of cryptic clues. An approach one could cautiously call "anti-commercial", or at the very least one that certainly doesn't ride any wave or chase any trend of the moment, doesn't seek catchiness or easy listening, doesn't lure in teenagers with simple melodies and sing-along choruses.

"Hit Me Hard And Soft" is instead a substantial work, cleverly composed, with ten intriguing songs full of nuance and ideas, in which it's often hard to recognize that very young, blue-haired – or green-, or white-haired – artist who so captivated the masses at the turn of the last decade. In this sense, Billie's fall into her own personal abyss, depicted on the cover, shouldn't be read negatively; the singer is submerging herself, not drowning, and while her gaze turns downward, it's toward the door that represents the way out. An exit that may still be out of reach, but one that, at least now, can be glimpsed.

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