Listen to two new dark and dazzling Billie Eilish songs
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.
A bitter dispute over ownership of Pioneertown roadhouse Pappy & Harriet’s has stirred fears among locals about the gentrification of their community.
A brand new track, “The 30th,” glows with a George Harrison-esque fingerpicking pattern. But its imagery of a close-call car crash imbues her hometown’s freeways with foreboding: “What if it happened to you on a different day / Or the Angeles Crest in the snow or the rain?”
Eilish has been even more cutting at recent performances. During her June headline set at England’s Glastonbury Festival, she lambasted the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn the constitutional right to an abortion in America, calling it “a really, really dark day for women in the U.S.” Fellow artists Olivia Rodrigo and Phoebe Bridgers spoke out about the same fears during their own Glastonbury sets.
Eilish’s tour supporting her second album “Happier Than Ever” heads to Asia starting next month, with shows in the Philippines, South Korea, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand and Japan.
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