Billie Eilish: Why pop’s great outlier has always done things differently

The voice at the other end of the line was quiet and thoughtful. The speaker was in the early stages of her career, not quite yet a global celebrity. She had nonetheless seen enough of fame to appreciate it was a dangerous animal, superficially appealing yet liable to turn on you in a heartbeat. “People do not understand what comes with it,” Billie Eilish said of her snowballing popularity. “You can’t have a normal life and be famous. It just doesn’t work that way.”

It was January 2018, and was still an underground pop star. She was still giving interviews, too, which is how I came to speak to her. She was droll and deadpan but friendly. She was also apprehensive about where she was going and the sacrifices it would involve.

“Whatever my fame is, or whatever you want to call it, I don’t want everyone to know everything I do,” she said. “They can know a part of it and be a part of it. It’s still my life. I’m still a human being. I don’t want to be everywhere all the time.”

Six years later, as she prepares to release her third album, Hit Me Hard and Soft, Eilish is one of the world’s biggest pop stars. Success in the music business always involves compromise, and the sky-high ticket prices for Eilish’s 2025 tour are a reminder that she isn’t immune from industry trends. But she remains an outlier, her dark, brooding songs subverting the idea that pop should be shiny and upbeat.

An Irishwoman in Denmark: ‘Life here is good, safe. But a bit boring if I am honest’

---

Coleen Nolan: ‘I haven’t had two failed marriages, I’ve had two amazing marriages, because they gave me amazing children’

---

Rod Stewart in Dublin review: The 79-year-old rock icon does his best to keep misery at bay amid downpours

---

She has always done things differently. Eilish’s early smash Bury a Friend was a nightmarish bopper that had more in common with a track by Nine Inch Nails than one by Dua Lipa or Madonna. When she sang the grippingly dark song at Electric Picnic last year, during her second appearance at the music festival, the throbbing red lighting and flames made it feel as if Stradbally was descending into a hellish otherworld.

[ Billie Eilish announces Dublin dates for 2025 with tour featuring eco-villages ]

Now, with Hit Me Hard and Soft, she has taken the comparatively unusual step of not putting out any music in advance: the album will arrive shrouded in mystery (though Taylor Swift got there first by pursuing the same strategy with The Tortured Poets Department last month).

“I don’t like singles from albums,” Eilish told Rolling Stone recently. “Every single time an artist I love puts out a single without the context of the album, I’m just already prone to hating on it. I really don’t like when things are out of context. This album is like a family: I don’t want one little kid to be in the middle of the room alone.”

But if not putting out a single is a departure, Hit Me Hard and Soft still feels thoroughly on brand: it is brilliantly Billie. The artwork shares the unsettling quality that has been a signature all the way back to her 2017 debut EP, Don’t Smile at Me, where she glowered in a red boiler suit. Carrying on that creepy sensibility, the cover of Hit Me Hard and Soft shows the singer deep underwater, gazing upwards at an open door.

Eilish’s expression is horror mixed with numbness and resignation – it’s Alice in Wonderland meets a public information video about the danger of paddling too far from shore. The inspiration, she explains, is her lifelong fear of drowning. She is immersing herself in one of her deepest terrors.

“I was basically waterboarding myself for six hours straight,” she said of the album’s cover shoot, which took place in a swimming pool near her home in Los Angeles. “If I’m not suffering somehow, I don’t feel good about what I’m doing.”

[ Billie Eilish at Electric Picnic 2023: ‘I have a fat fever. I’m sick as balls. I need you guys to give me all you got’ ]

Eilish was born Billie Eilish Pirate Baird O’Connell in December 2001 and grew up in Highland Park, a sprawling suburb in northeastern LA. Her parents, both actors and musicians, took “Eilish” from a documentary they saw about conjoined twins from Donadea, in Co Kildare. She and her older brother, Finneas (today her main musical collaborator), were homeschooled, though Eilish has bridled at suggestions her upbringing was unusual or hippyish.

“What does bohemian even mean?” she wondered in 2018. “My childhood was my childhood. I learned in different ways than a lot of people did. It doesn’t mean I was different. I was a little kid, and I did little-kid things ... Then I grew up. I’m a teenager now. I’m just like any other teenager. I just have a different job.”

Her frustration was clear. “The main issue, for me at least, was that a lot of my friends or people that I know don’t understand what I do and get mad at me if I can’t hang out with them or don’t respond to them,” she said.

“Suddenly I can’t hang out because I have to go to New York to do something. I feel that nobody really understands that it’s actually a job. It’s like someone working in an office can’t hang out because they have a shift. It’s still a job. Just because ... it’s not a boring job doesn’t mean it’s not a job. And it doesn’t mean I’m not working – and working really hard for something I want.”

Success came early. Eilish was in her teens when she sang Ocean Eyes, a Kate Bush-goes-shoegaze ballad that her brother had written about an ex-girlfriend. It went viral on SoundCloud, and the music industry came knocking.

“I was 13 when we started meeting labels. But it’s never ever been the reason for something: ‘She’s 13, she has to do this;’ ‘She’s 14, she has to do this.’ It’s about way more than that. It just happens to be that I’m young. It came up a couple of times,” she said. “Some people you meet – they are so their age. You meet them and they are 13. I’ve never really been that way. I think people who think you are talented ... if you are young they think you are even more talented. It’s almost unfair. I’ll take it.”

When she adopted “Eilish” as her stage name, Americans were initially unsure how it to pronounce it.

“I’m Scottish and Irish,” she told me in 2018. “I can’t tan at all. For years nobody had ‘Eilish’ even in their vocabulary. Literally the other day somebody stopped me in the street to take a picture, and he said that his girlfriend’s first name was Eilish. I was, like, ‘ohmygod’. I’m excited to go to Ireland and not be the only one. I like being unique and everything; I would also like to be somewhere people can pronounce my name correctly.”

When she appeared at Electric Picnic for the first time, the following summer, she told the crowd, “I’m part Irish, dude ... This is my home.” She gave a knockout turn to what felt like most of the music festival’s 57,000 or so attendees, her immense drawing power already clear from that early-evening performance on the event’s first night. It was like watching a newly formed pop comet hurtle past.

The heavy price of fame was the theme of Eilish’s second album, Happier Than Ever, a portrait of an artist alienated and unmoored by their sudden prominence.

“Billie is so famous that people that aren’t fans of hers at all are taking photos of her while she’s walking through a park so that they can show their friend in a photo that they saw her,” Finneas told The Irish Times in 2021, a few months after the album’s release. “Stuff like that, or paparazzi or articles, just make your life way harder.”

They are both acutely aware of the scrutiny that comes with their status as hitmakers and Grammy winners. “I can’t make the internet go away,” Finneas said to me. “I mean, obviously there’s nothing I can do about that. The Pandora’s box is open. And of course we wouldn’t have a career without the internet. You can appreciate the good of it. And you can try your best to make yourself not subject yourself to the bad of it.

“It’s important to protect your mental health from places like Twitter mentions,” he continued. “People are willing to say anonymously meaner things than they’ll ever say to you on a street. I find it more and more important to ignore the internet.”

[ Billie Eilish: Happier Than Ever review – A suffocating picture of stardom ]

[ Finneas O’Connell: ‘Being as famous as Billie seems like a drag’ ]

Happier Than Ever was recorded in the uneasy stillness of early lockdown – Finneas has compared it to making an album in a tornado shelter as a storm roars outside.

The reviews were positive, but it didn’t sell as well as Eilish’s 2019 debut, When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? The former shifted nearly 15 million units, the latter “just” five million. Nor did it have the same cultural impact. So it isn’t a surprise that, with Hit Me Hard and Soft, Eilish and Finneas have turned to their older sound for inspiration.

“I feel like this album has some real ghosts in it, and I say that with love,” Finneas told Rolling Stone. “There’s ideas on this album that are five years old, and there’s a past to it, which I really like. When Billie talks about the era of When We All Fall Asleep, it was this theatricality and this darkness. What’s the thing that no one is as good at as Billie is? This album was an exploration of what we do best.”

[ Billie Eilish: When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? review – mature beyond her years ]

Eilish and her brother planned to maintain a low profile ahead of Hit Me Hard and Soft. So they were caught unawares by the viral popularity of What Was I Made For?, the nursery-rhyme-style ballad they recorded for the Barbie movie soundtrack.

The song, a whispered meditation on girlhood and the trials of growing up that chimed with the theme of the Margot Robbie film, was soon trending on TikTok, where users made video collages of their own experiences of girlhood. It won a Grammy and an Oscar – Eilish’s second, after the Bond theme No Time to Die.

“It was so moving, dude. It was so, so touching,” Eilish said recently. “I feel like I helped bring people together, and it felt so special. I wasn’t expecting to have women around the world feel connected.”

Eilish comes across as down to earth by the standards of global pop icons. She has a long-standing commitment to climate justice, and although all musicians stand open to the charge of hypocrisy given the touring industry’s high carbon footprint, Eilish goes further than most to make amends. She refrains from using private jets, opting to always fly commercial.

She also recently brought down the wrath of Swift fans when criticising the practice of releasing multiple vinyl editions of an album. Such was the backlash she had to clarify that, no, it wasn’t a diss at Swift. Eilish has herself put out multiple vinyl records (albeit made from recycled materials). She was critiquing a general trend in the industry.

Above all, she seems mindful of her privileged position. Eilish understands that the best way to stay grounded is to focus on her songwriting and let everything else take care of itself.

“My one wish,” Eilish told me in 2018, “is to not take things for granted. If you think about things while you are doing them – ‘Well, this is insane’ – that kind of messes you up. In my head, I take everything that comes as if it is normal. I do my thing as if no one is watching or listening.”

Hit Me Hard and Soft is released on Friday, May 17th