1 day ago
7
Where do you go as a pop star when you’ve already hit the top? Maybe you flame out and move to Vegas. Maybe you launch a billion-dollar makeup line and never perform again. Maybe you re-record all your hits, take the world’s biggest victory lap and break a seismological record.
If you’re Billie Eilish, you burrow deeper. You continue transcribing the deadening thrum of fame, the banality and brutality of public opinion. You keep excavating all your quivering neuroses until you’re in a crater of your own creation. Or – as on the cover of Eilish’s 2024 album Hit Me Hard and Soft – you’re submerged in a bottomless well, grasping for the surface.
Not that those anxieties stop you from putting on an arena spectacular. At Brisbane’s Entertainment Centre, the first stop on her Australian tour, Eilish moulds the room like putty. Often it feels like a cult gathering. Every second attendee is dressed in some variation of their idol’s signature silhouette: tiny hat, giant shorts, wireframe glasses, sports jersey. Some have been camping outside for days in flimsy tents.
Midway through, Eilish demands total silence for a rendition of her 2018 single When the Party’s Over – and the 10,000-strong audience complies, bound in suspended animation for the better part of a minute. Later, during the lovelorn belter The Greatest, Eilish soars on a pedestal far into the air: a glorious new-age leader exorcising her heartache – and ours – to the firmament.
The sheer rapture feels new for an artist who has often spoken about the tolls of performing. “I didn’t realise that I could make touring enjoyable,” Eilish said in a Vogue profile last year. “I just was very lonely for many years, and I’m not interested in that any more. I want to enjoy the show.”
Enjoy she does. Frequently, she breaks into a sprint around her figure eight stage, circling her live band in infinite loops. This is her first tour without her brother and longtime producer, Finneas, though his absence – with apologies – is hardly noticeable. Eilish swerves, vaults and ducks between hyaline screens that partially obscure her figure, resisting the glare of the spotlight. At times she’s a blur of splayed limbs – and then she picks up the camera, her face suddenly gargantuan and duplicated around the stadium.
It’s a canny cat-and-mouse game and a nod to the themes she has written about her entire career: the trapdoors of visibility, the futile dream of privacy. And her star has only continued to rise since she was last in Australia in 2022. Her doleful Barbie contribution What Was I Made For? made her the youngest person to win two Oscars (after her first victory for the Bond theme No Time to Die). Then came the blockbuster Birds of a Feather, a song about a self-immolating crush that now has more than 2bn streams on Spotify.
As expected, both those tracks are lodestones on the setlist, rousing a crowd that’s otherwise somewhat subdued – or “polite”, as Eilish puts it euphemistically. (It’s a Tuesday night; they might be forgiven.) Even so, there’s no resisting the bawdy allure of Lunch, Eilish’s sapphic provocation which has the entire audience – hilariously – chanting each come-on at full volume. Equally invigorating is her verse on the Charli xcx collaboration Guess: a lascivious ode to lacy undergarments that turns the arena into a rave worthy of its colossal, squelching bass.
Throughout, there are hints of Eilish’s earlier trademarks. The macabre streak which underscored much of her debut record snakes through the show: the flash of a slithering alligator on screen, or the menacing mosquito synths of her early single Bury a Friend, amplified with literal pyrotechnics on stage.
But this is a tour that makes room for evolution. Eilish’s delivery on Guess – a seductive deadpan – is a far cry from the gauzy whisper on which she made her name. Elsewhere, on Hit Me Hard and Soft closer Blue, she snarls in a sinister baritone; halfway through L’Amour De Ma Vie, a poison pen letter to a former flame, Eilish stretches her voice through Auto-Tune, elasticated and crackling over a dance breakdown.
These tracks feel as stochastic as the weather. They enter noiselessly, then – buoyed by a rapid gust – they shudder and skyrocket. When you’ve already hit the top, you just keep going.
-
Billie Eilish is performing in Brisbane until 22 February, Sydney 24-28 February and Melbourne 4-8 March
