Eight Months in Murakami’s Head

You Should See Me in a Crown is a song that works as a threat, a question, and an invitation simultaneously, and Billie Eilish at seventeen was already making music that operated on multiple registers at once. The track moves on poppier instincts than some of her other work from that period—cleaner, more direct—but the animated music video Takashi Murakami made for it is anything but.

Murakami spent eight months on the animation, working with his team to translate what Eilish had in her head into something visual. Eight months, from start to finish, I worked on that video. I tried with my animation team to bring Billie’s vision to life, he said. What emerged: flowers splitting open into skulls, spiders blooming from crowns, the whole thing rendered in that maximalist Murakami palette that sits perfectly between cute and genuinely unsettling. Eilish described the collaboration as a real honor and talked about letting their brains and worlds collide. That collision is the point.

She and her brother Finneas O’Connell co-wrote You Should See Me in a Crown together, as they did most of her early catalog, and you can hear a shared sensibility at work—the willingness to make pop that doesn’t explain itself, that trusts you to follow it into darker territory. Handing that material to Murakami, whose entire practice involves making darkness adorable and adorability disturbing, was either an obvious call or an inspired one. Probably both. What strikes me most about this period of Eilish’s work isn’t any single song or video but the coherence of it—the way every output exists in recognizably the same world, inhabited by the same very particular mind.