Album Review Billie Eilish - When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?

When Billie Eilish arrived in London for a three-night stint at Shepherd’s Bush Empire last month, it felt like the first proper physical manifestation in the UK of what the internet had known for a long while now. Kids camped out since the early hours of the morning. Tickets going for upwards of £300 on secondary sites. Ear-splitting screams up there with any that have greeted history’s bona fide teenage icons, from The Beatles to BTS.

The fervour around the 17-year-old LA star feels at once both hyper modern and yet completely classic. She’s a child of the internet, whose legend - from her first Soundcloud demo of ‘Ocean Eyes’ in 2016 - has arisen largely via that platform rather than through endless touring and promo. However, like any cult teen obsession since the dawn of time, half of her charm is that the kids love her and the old bores don’t get it. She belongs to the youth and your mum probably only heard of her last week when the billboards started becoming un-ignorable.

Yet now, with the unbelievably hyped release of debut LP ‘When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?’, is the time when music’s biggest secret superstar goes fully above ground. Before its release, the album had already become Apple Music’s most pre-added album ever; it seems nigh-on impossible that Billie won’t soar into Number One come next Friday. So does the singer have the chops to go from beloved youth icon into a genuine, mass-appealing, world-beating star? Not for years has the answer been such an exciting, resounding ‘yes’.

‘When We All Fall Asleep…’ is almost certainly the weirdest album from a huge, major label pop concern in recent memory. It is, as represents a young person born into an age with everything at their fingertips, an amorphous thing that pays little attention to genre, going from grinding industrial throbs (‘you should see me in a crown’) to playful trap beats (opener ‘bad guy’) to fragile, forlorn balladry (‘listen before i go’) to big, cheeky classic pop (‘wish u were gay’) at will. It begins with a 10-second snippet of Billie pissing around in the studio: “I’ve taken out my Invisalign [brace], now here’s the album!”. There’s even a track - the whomping, minimal 90s hip-hop of ‘my strange addiction’ - that, amazingly, has samples from The Office US dotted throughout.