Where do you go as a pop star when you’ve already hit the top? Maybe you flame out and move to Vegas. Maybe you launch a billion-dollar makeup line and never perform again. Maybe you re-record all your hits, take the world’s biggest victory lap and break a seismological record.
If you’re Billie Eilish, you burrow deeper. You continue transcribing the deadening thrum of fame, the banality and brutality of public opinion. You keep excavating all your quivering neuroses until you’re in a crater of your own creation. Or – as on the cover of Eilish’s 2024 album Hit Me Hard and Soft – you’re submerged in a bottomless well, grasping for the surface.
