The pop innovator tours her third album with a stadium gig that draws the crowd in close, coaxing shivers out of an audience of thousands
Perched on chairs at the centre of a vast rectangular stage, Billie Eilish and her guitarist are going a bit jazz. Set-list surprises are hard to work into arena shows (timings operate to the second), but on the fourth night of six at London’s O2 Arena, Eilish performs something unexpected: a cover of Moon River.
Written for Audrey Hepburn to sing in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and later covered by Frank Sinatra, a teenage Amy Winehouse and – more recently – Frank Ocean, this dreamy song wouldn’t have sounded out of place on Eilish’s second album, Happier Than Ever (2021), with its evocations of retro screen glamour and heartbreak. Everyone is rapt.
Such acoustic moments attempt to crowbar in some kind of intimacy to the unpromising distances and thousands-strong audiences of a big show. But Eilish is particularly adept at creating closeness, then doing something interesting with it. She knows how to coax shivers out of a mainstream pop audience. Her debut LP, When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? (2019), was the stuff of nightmares, her hushed vocals somewhere between ASMR and the last voice you might ever hear.
Moments before Moon River, Eilish and her childhood friends Ava and Jane Horner – backing vocalists on this tour – gather together to sing Your Power. The band are in two sunken pits, but Eilish is on the principal acoustic guitar and, really, this is a close circle of three women. Their voices join to speak of the damage done to a young woman by a predatory older man. (“She said you were a hero, you played the part / But you ruined her in a year, don’t act like it was hard.”) The audience are a furious Greek chorus, shrieking the lyric “How dare you?” in stark contrast to the singers’ mournful delicacy.
Her hushed vocals are somewhere between ASMR and the last voice you might ever hear
The song, which contains the instruction “Try not to abuse your power”, was first played on the US leg of this tour in Nashville on 6 November last year, and some read it as a response to Donald Trump’s electoral win. These, then, are the softest parts of the Hit Me Hard and Soft tour – named after Eilish’s third album, released in May 2024.
The show is a masterclass in squaring circles; in how to use geometric space creatively and in how to reconcile the successful Eilish, the co-writer of the most streamed song of 2024 on Spotify – her wispy Birds of a Feather – with the home-schooled prodigy whose threatening whisper disrupted the music scene back in 2019.
The set’s two-pit quadrilateral makes Eilish run figure-of-eight laps beneath a bravura display of saturated colour, blurry security camera footage and lasers. Images are projected on a giant cube above the stage – sports fans should visualise an NBA jumbotron – while another hydraulic toy centre-stage sometimes serves as a hovering platform, sometimes as another cube of screens.
There are cameras everywhere, including in Eilish’s hand as she films herself, the fans and what you might call the backstage area. (She increasingly directs her own videos.)
The singer is at the centre of it all. She is a pop innovator: her debut album was off the hook, completely unprecedented; her second upended any expectations it set for her. Her third lacks the shock value of these predecessors: it is merely very good, rather than excellent, teasing new electronic directions without fully committing.
Its best bits sound terrific tonight the clean club-pop lines of Lunch, a come-on to a girl, are seductive; L’Amour de Ma Vie, a track that pointedly dissects the end of a relationship, climaxes in a rave workout.
The older songs hit hardest, though. The night ends with Birds of a Feather, a pretty, loved-up tune that – its death obsession aside – could have been written by a much more generic songwriter for a more conventional singer. But the real climax comes one track earlier with Happier Than Ever. That showstopper deceptively begins with a soothing ukulele strum not too far from Moon River’s.
But as the song winds on, Eilish wields an electric guitar, slamming the door shut on a relationship so hard the rafters tremble. “Just fucking leave me alone!” she howls, with an entire arena on backing vocals. What Was I Made For? Eilish wondered on her excellent song for the Barbie film.
The answer is here.
Photograph by Henry Hwu
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