On Billie Eilish’s recent European tour – including her history-making set as Glastonbury’s youngest solo headliner – she has said she was struck by the dissonance between the euphoric crowds and the desolate news coming from her native US.
“I would mention some stuff about the state of home and it was just so weird to be in a place where they weren’t having to deal with that,” she told Apple Music. “Then I was thinking back to everyone at home and just being like, ‘Wow, what the fuck? What’s going on?’”
That kind of queasy perspective shift underpins her two new surprise singles, released as the Guitar Songs EP. For a songwriter who made her name on lyrics wreathed with horror-movie imagery, Eilish has become a realist songwriter of great subtlety, one who makes light work of crushing material and without ever lessening its impact.
The first song, TV, got its live debut in Manchester recently, and made headlines for referencing the unedifying spectacle of Johnny Depp and Amber Heard’s court battle, as well as the – then rumoured, now horrifyingly real – overturning of constitutional abortion rights in the US.
“The internet’s gone wild watching movie stars on trial / While they’re overturning Roe v Wade,” she sings, her voice softened by felty harmonies, as her brother Finneas’s acoustic guitar takes on a softly Pink Floyd-worthy sense of scope.
In the wrong hands, that could sound a bit chiding: accusing people of fiddling while Rome burns. But Eilish, never one to flinch from her own crosshairs, indicts herself as well. Seemingly in the middle of an argument with a lover, if not a full-blown breakup, she opts to shut the world out and switch on TV: “I put on Survivor just to watch somebody suffer,” she sings. “What’s the point of anything?”
Eilish has always been acutely aware of our proclivity for destruction as a form of entertainment, and the immediacy of TV recalls Lana Del Rey’s The Greatest, with the world engulfed by heat and Kanye “blond and gone”.
Fittingly, the melody of each line seems to tumble, each one a crumbling empire delivered in her tremulous, feather-light voice. “Maybe I’m the problem,” she sings endlessly, which might feel a bit self-flagellating at first.
But then, maybe, the point of it all emerges: the acoustic recording blends with the sound of the crowd from the Manchester show, hearing the song for the first time ever, yet repeating the lines. Their shared helplessness gets louder and louder, building from sympathy to a sort of staunch communion.
The 30th is more insular: a terrifying account of a friend who had what sounds like a life-changing car accident. The guitar is sweeter, her voice even more delicate, the soft piano barely perceptible: a spider’s web barely holding the fragile balance of the situation. After the fact, Eilish realises that their crash was the cause of the traffic jam she was in that day.
“When I saw the ambulances on the shoulder / I didn’t even think of pulling over / I pieced it all together late that night.” A slew of what-ifs follow with a rising sense of panic, a crescendo of rushing thoughts and overlapping vocal harmonies – “What if it happened to you on a different day? On a bridge where there wasn’t a rail in the way?” – that build to a yell before Eilish’s lone voice tapers off, like a bird flying free from a flock: “You’re alive.”
Eilish told Apple Music that she wanted these songs to come out quickly, without any of the pageantry that usually accompanies a major-label pop release. For a pop star whose image has been endlessly pored over and which often plays a supporting role in her work, immediacy turns out to suit her.
We get the visceral sense of a young woman watching things she holds dear being destroyed, or almost destroyed, and agonising over what happens when we stop looking. But Eilish, developing at warp speed as a songwriter, isn’t looking away.
