If you've spent too much time lately watching garbage TV and feeling miserable about the state of the world, so has Billie Eilish.
The 20-year-old singer-songwriter, three months after her Coachella headline set, released a pair of new singles on Thursday, the fan-favorite live cut "TV" and "The 30th." Both are graceful, acoustic guitar-driven ballads with a very 2022 sense of alienation and worry.
Eilish and her producer/brother Finneas have played versions of "TV" on her current tour (the recorded version samples some crowd noise from a U.K. show). The song gently alludes to Elliott Smith's "The Biggest Lie" in its chord progressions, but the lyrics about numbing malaise with bad TV ("I put on 'Survivor' just to watch somebody suffer") and the demise of abortion rights in America ("The internet's gone wild watching movie stars on trial/ While they're overturning Roe v. Wade") place it in the last few weeks of history.
