NOIR POP WITH TEETH

Singer Billie Eilish’s captivating debut album

Billie eilish is a 17-yearold home-schooled choir-singer-turned-Top40-prodigy. And she’s every bit as awesomely messed up as that creepy pedigree implies.

The demon spawn of Lana Del Rey’s California, Eilish opened 2019 with her hit single “Bury a Friend,” singing, “The way

I’m drinkin’ you down/Like I wanna drown,” over a muted goth-R&B throb. Yet despite her forbidding persona, the darkly smirking candor of Eilish’s music still sucks you in. At the onset of her noirish major-label debut, When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?, she offers a generous, audible slurp: “I’ve taken out my Invisalign,” she says, alluding to a brand of braces. “And this is the album!” Dental guard: off. Fangs: out.

Recorded with the help of her older brother Finneas in their family home in Los Angeles,

When We All Fall Asleep is an album full of dressed-down avant-pop with DIY immediacy and intimacy that can still hold its own amid pop maximalists like Ariana Grande and Halsey. Eilish’s sound is hypermodern but still feels classic, setting the jazz-aware swing in her vocals over skittering trap beats and doo-wop piano asides. On the slinky “Bad Guy,” she sounds like Lorde’s rascally kid sister boasting, “Make-your-mama-sad type, make-your-girlfriend-mad type, might-seduce-your-dad type.”

But Eilish is able to let her guard down too. In “Xanny,” she says a hard no to drugs, if only out of respect for friends she’s lost to them, and on the high-drama ballad “When the Party’s Over,” she hungers for love and friendship that last. It’s moments like these when Eilish isn’t just someone to fear, she’s someone to root for.