billie eilish when we all fall asleep where do we go

I worry about people born in the 21st century. There’s something deep and dark stirring in our collective consciousness. They’re seeing it firsthand. The last generation grew up with at least the pretense of decency, with a sense that “the arc of history bends toward justice.” This decade says morality goes wherever the masses do; if they tug too hard in the wrong direction, the rest of the union gets yanked along by their preoccupations. People coming of age right now are seeing hate, selfishness, and shameless, lawless grift growing new roots. They’re being bombarded with bad news at a speed that’s dizzying to process, and they live with the expectation that they’ll be transparent about their thoughts and feelings all the while. It doesn’t make sense. It requires superhuman poise and a bold belief that in spite of what ails us right now, we, as a planet, are going to be fine in the end. That they’re adapting and not despairing is astounding. “Gen Z” will save the future, but only if we can get them there in one piece.

billie eilish when we all fall asleep where do we go

Billie Eilish is a 17-year-old singer-songwriter with a preternatural self-awareness, a sweet and mousy but also capricious singing voice, and an impeccable ear for melody. Eilish has only been writing music for five years; she composed her first song at 12 and recorded her first one at 13. She’s sharper than a lot of writers who’ve been at it for much longer. She is, like anyone living under the age of 21 through history, the picture of cool, aloof boredom. Eilish is not your archetypal millennial teen — she was homeschooled by her parents, the Scottish and Irish actors Maggie Baird and Patrick O’Connell, and encouraged in her interests in the arts by her older brother, Finneas, who also acts, sings, writes, and produces — but her music resonates because she is able to articulate the absurdities of the young American experience with wit, tenderness, and brutal honesty. Her debut album When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? is a quiet revolution, both intricate and also delicate, sweet but sometimes prickly, like berries in a bramble.

“I’m the bad guy,” Billie Eilish declares in “Bad Guy,” the first song on her debut album, “When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?”; then the music pauses to splice in one spoken, very teenage syllable: “Duh!” You can hear the eyeroll.

Eilish, 17, has spent the last few years establishing herself as the negation of what a female teen-pop star used to be. She doesn’t play innocent, or ingratiating, or flirtatious, or perky, or cute. Instead, she’s sullen, depressive, death-haunted, sly, analytical and confrontational, all without raising her voice.

On singles and EPs, like her 2017 EP “Don’t Smile at Me,” Eilish’s songs have treated love as a power struggle, an absurd game, and a destructive obsession, racking up more than a billion streams from listeners who apparently share her sentiments. On her Instagram page, which has more than 15 million followers, she is brusquely anti-fashion, swaddling herself in shapeless, oversized, boldly colored clothes and making silly or ghoulish faces. “I do what I want when I’m wanting to/My soul so cynical,” she notes in “Bad Guy.” But that’s just her starting point. While Eilish’s previous releases have featured her flinty, defensive side, her debut album also admits to sorrows and vulnerabilities.

Though Eilish hasn't had the opportunity to meet Bieber in person (yet!), she's been a fan of his for years now. "It started when I was, like, 12, I believe," she confessed, adding that she totally had "big a**" posters of him plastered all over her bedroom walls.

"He's amazing," she gushed. "He's so sweet and, like, I feel -- just, honestly, I feel for him, man. He's been through a lot, dude."

Like Bieber, Eilish has found her own success in the music industry at such a young age. She began writing original songs at the age of 11, and released her first EP, Don't Smile at Me, in August 2017, when she was 15 years old.

Now, Eilish is preparing for the next big step, with the release of her debut studio album, When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? Although it was just released on Friday, the singer-songwriter has already been slashing Spotify and Apple Music Records. Asked if she's ready for this next level of stardom, Eilish adorably exclaimed, "No!"

"No, honestly, I think, like... I feel like I am," she clarified. "I feel like I always have been [ready] a little bit, without really realizing it."

Later in the interview, Eilish also couldn't help herself from gushing over another pop singer, Ariana Grande. She told ET that it's amazing to see all these female forces dominating music right now.

"That girl is the king!" she marveled. "She's the king. For sure. I don't know, it's really [sick] to see how things are changing and how people [are] kind of, like, understanding that [us girls] are all just doing our thing."

"I'm just hoping for the best," Eilish added of her own path. "I'm just trying to enjoy it and not complain. 'Cause what is there to complain about?"

For a peek inside Spotify's Billie Eilish Experience -- and to see her amazing reaction at the moment her album dropped -- check out the video below. 

The party had an open bar, but Billie Eilish was nowhere near the free champagne. At 17, the evening’s star and musical guest was a good 10 years younger than most of the hip Manhattan crowd filling the cavernous Lower East Side gallery on a February night. The occasion? The launch of her magazine cover for Garage, created by the renowned artist Takashi Murakami.

Eilish, a singer-songwriter beloved by Gen Z–she has 15 million Instagram followers–is not yet a household name. But with her debut album, When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?, out March 29, she’s well on her way. Even before its release, she has nearly 6 billion streams across platforms and is Spotify’s second most popular female artist this year. And she got there on the strength of an image that’s equal parts enigmatic and open, and music that swings from eerie trap-pop to whisper-sweet balladry, all wrapped up in existential pain. Her refusal to conform makes her a voice of a generation that desires authenticity above all. “I don’t care what you don’t like about me,” she says. “I care what I have to say.”

pop prodigy Billie Eilish has exerted a lot of energy creating a unified, cohesive online and musical identity—no capital letters, fashion cues borrowed from Tyler, the Creator, an intentionally spooky aesthetic—so it makes sense, in a way, that her album release would be an “experience,” coded and packaged for streaming-era release. On Thursday evening, the young singer hosted a release party for her debut album, When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?, with Spotify in Los Angeles, California, an event that was attended by guests as varied as Heidi Klum and Amelia Gray and Delilah Belle Hamlin (in a pair of pants that read “stop looking at my d--k” across the front). (Justin Bieber regrets that he was unable to make it.)

Titled “The Billie Eilish Experience,” the fête included rooms based on each of the songs on Eilish’s album. “I wanted it to literally be like an exhibit, a museum, a place to smell and hear and feel,” she told Billboard on Thursday evening. “Every room has a certain temperature, every room has a certain smell, a certain color, a certain texture on the walls. A certain shape, a certain number.” Ushering guests through were staff members in jumpsuits emblazoned with Eilish’s “blohsh” symbol—sort of like the figure that indicates a male restroom, but with a hunchback. Eilish’s status as goth hypebeast par excellence was exemplified in the Takashi Murakami-designed sculpture of her that loomed over the entrance to the event.

And presiding over the whole thing was Eilish herself, in a logo-heavy look riffing on Louis Vuitton by the independent artist Tsuwoop. A bucket hat, balaclava, hoodie, and wide trousers were capped off with white Nike sneakers; stylist Samantha Burkhart, who was also responsible for that extremely memed Poppy look at the iHeartRadio Music Awards and Eilish’s Sailor Moon-illustrated look at the same event, also tagged Chrome Hearts in her post to Instagram depicting the full look.