For the better part of her career, Billie Eilish has found herself besieged by attention. Every move is subject to surgical dissection, unleashing shockwaves of discourse.
Sometimes it’s innocuous: last year, TikTok spread a gleefully deranged conspiracy theory that her trademark slime green roots had been replaced by an identical wig concealing a fresh dye job, in anticipation of a new album. Other instances have been more insidious. At just 20, she has already spent years speaking widely about the internet’s invasive, damaging fascination with her body, her clothing – either too much or not enough – and her sexuality.
Spare a thought for those naysayers – or not. At Sydney’s Qudos Bank Arena, the first leg of her Australian tour, she reclaims the agency she may have once ceded to lecherous commentators and puffed-up macho men with little to offer. On Tuesday night, they get their comeuppance via a thoroughly deserved public shaming, courtesy of a 20,000-strong throng of audience members whose voices grow ever hoarser.
“How dare you,” the audience chants at full volume during a rendition of Your Power, Eilish’s riposte against the abusive men who exist, indiscriminately, at the peak of all industries. Therefore I Am, a kiss-off to the fair-weather friends trading on her image for clout, becomes a battle cry. “Stop!” the crowd roars in one of its most memorable lines. “What the hell are you talking about?”
Last time Eilish was in Sydney, she performed at a venue a quarter the size; the time before that, in 2017, she played a pub gig at the Lansdowne, its bookers woefully underestimating her budding legion of fans. The arena is certainly more fitting, and it feels as though every teen (and tween) in the city has descended on it, many of them dwarfed by giant hoodies and carrying devotional placards. “Sign my cast,” reads one of them. “You were my bi awakening,” reads another.
It’s a gargantuan crowd and Eilish is fully in control. It’s a wild and beautiful thing. It might be cliched to describe her rise as meteoric, but how else to colour an artist who, in the six years since her first single went Soundcloud-viral, has ticked off more accomplishments than most would accrue in a lifetime? With seven Grammys and an Oscar (for her Bond theme) under her belt, she became, this year, the youngest festival headliner for both Coachella and Glastonbury – a feat reflected in the ease with which she leaps, sashays, writhes and slithers across the stage.
The set is minimal, built from an oversized ramp and a peninsula jutting into the audience: all the more space for her to dance, often bathed in a blood-red glow. Her moves are reminiscent of Lorde’s free-associative, jagged choreography, except less art school and more feral – suffused with the freedom of someone unshackled from former constraints.
The analogy makes sense: Eilish is ostensibly touring her most recent album Happier Than Ever, which sees her graduating from the claustrophobic horrors of her debut record When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? into a more expansive symphony of genres. An orchestral choir at the start of album cut Goldwing sounds more heavenly than ever, voices floating skyward towards the arena’s cavernous ceilings. The stuttering, serrated bassline of Oxytocin – a horned-up lovefest referencing a threesome with God herself – gets the club treatment as columns of light descend on the audience like UFO beams.
Sometimes, the gothic horrors of her earlier work return. Projections behind her veer towards jump-scares: a leering shark, a Lovecraftian creature that’s all sinew and bone, and – much to my chagrin, as a known arachnophobe – a giant spider. But these are merely spectacle in a show centred on a newer, gentler Eilish: one who tells her concertgoers to hug their neighbours no less than twice, who commands us to take deep breaths with her while we “think about what we’re grateful for”.
If it’s all starting to sound a little like Catholic mass – well, to some in the audience, it just might be. One of her newest singles – the homespun polemic TV, released in a surprise drop last month – ends with a collective mantra acknowledging our complicity in the sorry state of the world and, strangely, relinquishing our guilt. “Sing along!” she implores, and we obey with religious zeal: “Maybe I, maybe I, maybe I’m the problem,” goes the refrain, offering something close to deliverance.
Tracks such as these might not congeal with the surliness of her megahits (Bad Guy or Bury a Friend, both of which inspire infernal reactions from the mosh) but perhaps they don’t have to: they’re testament to Eilish’s warp-speed evolution as a songwriter and performer.
“I think I’m ageing well,” she sings on Getting Older, as a dizzying array of childhood photos zooms through the background. Descending into the crowd, her vocals are punctured by the shriek of fans, tears streaming down their faces. Soon, she breaks too, laughing through the track; in the crush, a sign is barely visible: “I GHOSTED MY THERAPIST TO SEE YOU.”
Billie Eilish’s Australian tour continues through Sydney, Brisbane, Melbourne and Perth through September
