She Wrote the Monster Under the Bed

The video for Bury a Friend opens with syringes going into Billie Eilish’s back and escalates from there. Director Michael Chaves shoots the whole thing like a waking nightmare—hands reaching from under a mattress, a body dragged across the floor, Billie herself staring into the camera with that flat affect that communicates more dread than screaming ever would. The song underneath is spare and ugly in the best sense: bass frequencies that sit in the chest, a vocal floating above them like it’s already detached from the body. It’s the kind of track that made me sit with my headphones on for a few minutes after it ended, not doing anything in particular.

She was seventeen when she made it, which tells you something about how useless age is as a metric for artistic maturity. She and her brother Finneas O’Connell wrote it together, the way they’ve written most of her catalog, in the bedroom of their family’s LA house—no co-writers flown in from Stockholm, no consultants, just two siblings and a laptop and whatever was in their heads that week. What ends up on the track is always unmistakably hers. The register she operates in—intimate, slightly threatening, more comfortable with darkness than most adult artists allow themselves to be—doesn’t sound like anything else in pop.

Bury a Friend was the lead single from her debut album, When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?, which arrived in March 2019 and confirmed everything the singles had promised. Tracks like All the Good Girls Go to Hell and My Strange Addiction sat next to minimal piano ballads and mid-tempo electronic pieces that somehow all belonged in the same room. The album wasn’t perfect, but it had a vision—a consistent emotional atmosphere that most debut records fail to sustain across a full runtime. She’d known exactly what it was going to be long before anyone else did.