In Billie Eilish’s haunting video for bad guy, scenes of her riding down the street in a toy car and dancing without a bloody care in the world help bookend the disturbing imagery of nose bleeds, severed heads in plastic bags and drowning some poor bloke in milk and cereal. The video completely captures the entire essence of her debut album When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? – the twisted freedom of youth and its vulnerability to the darkness of adulthood.
In a world where social media dictates what we do and how we should live our lives, Eilish hasn’t let algorithms, filters and character limits restrict how far her imagination can go. WWAFAWDWG is an acrobatic tightrope walk between the freedom of her adolescence and the jadedness of her burgeoning adulthood, and she pulls it off with complete finesse.
This duality is evident from the very start, when opening track !!!!!!! is literally just her taking her Invisalign out. It’s an acknowledgement of her departure from youth as she dives head first into being as macabre, creepy and bizarre as she sees fit. bad guy, the album’s biggest banger, sees her embrace villainy – something she’s done before on bellyache – and some incredibly suggestive lyrics. She only continues to fall into the unfiltered depths of her mind with tracks like xanny and when the party’s over.
On track wish you were gay, she courts some controversy by saying that she would rather her love interest be gay as opposed to just not into her. It’s a message that angered the Woke Police, but it speaks volumes about how social media has made us think about teens. Eilish’s generation is certainly the ~wokest~ but that doesn’t mean they can’t falter. Eilish, at 17, has a completely vivid understanding that her debut album has to be as honest to herself as possible, and she has left no thoughts uncensored. She’s still got time to learn from not only her mistakes, but also the mistakes of the generations that came before her, and yet she has given herself the emotional maturity to feel all that she needs to feel despite how people may condemn her for it.
Throughout the whole album, however, the theme that shines the strongest is fearlessness. Not a fearlessness that we see from our superheroes on the big screen, but the sort of innocent fearlessness spurred by curiosity that wanes away from us as we learn more about the world. The music of the album is sparse in some parts and explosive in others, as her voice distorts and contracts and growls in ways reminiscent of a horror movie. It’s completely ambitious and at some points reckless, but such is adolescence.
In fact, the last time a teen artist was this ambitious was when a 16-year-old Lorde dropped her debut album Pure Heroine. Almost like a perfect sister album to this one, Pure Heroine explored and found the beauty within the mundaneness of everyday teen life. When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?, however, zooms across to the other end of the spectrum and looks to find the only the most extreme emotions and adventures that adolescence bestows upon us.
But perhaps the most endearing part of Eilish’s debut is how it takes us all back to our teenage selves. The way she sings about love on songs like my strange addiction and i love you is packed with such vulnerability and honesty that we tend to hide from one another, as we get older. With emotional maturity comes an innate sense to expose those emotions only when necessary, while Eilish feels no shame in revealing her feelings whenever she wants to. She doesn’t subscribe to the outdated, ‘traditional’ values society has tried to place on her and her craft, and she’s out to smash those borders whichever way she can. Despite being an album made by a teen for teens, it feels painfully relatable to everyone because we’ve all been there.
Trying to get a stranglehold on all our emotions at once is a daunting enough task as an adult, but as a teenager it can be completely overwhelming. Billie Eilish's debut doesn’t seek to try and control or even comprehend where her mind takes her, but lets her do it with complete freedom. It’s a sense of exploration that goes hand in hand with youth. It’s dark, it’s twisted, it’s vulnerable, it’s bizarre, it’s problematic, it’s endearing, it’s optimistic. And ultimately, it’s life. While she might ponder on where our minds take us when we’re asleep, it’s clear to everyone else that Eilish isn’t limiting her visionary and ground-breaking songwriting to when her eyes are shut. She’s wide awake, and maybe it’s time for us - who have forgotten what it feels like - to wake up too.
