19. Lunch

Billie Eilish: Hit Me Hard and Soft (Darkroom/Interscope, 2024);
composed by Billie Eilish O'Connell and Finneas O'Connell

It was not until I heard this that I realized how fervently I had been anticipating a full on dance song and even fuller on sex song from Billie Eilish, without having the foggiest notion that I was. Not that I had any doubt she and brother Finneas had it in them, or anything else, insofar as even the relative juvenilia on Don’t Smile At Me pops almost as hard as the stuff on the debut, and without a lot of industry types getting in the way, they have not made even an ordinary record yet, let alone a bad one. “Baby I think you were made for me / Somebody write down the recipe,” she goes, and when you read it back you immediately realize that the words in your head are probably nowhere near close to the way she sings it, slipping and sliding lubriciously over what sounds like the evenest of rhythms, but is not. And while this music really is about her – Finneas’s own merely pleasant solo music barely gets out of the driveway – it is also about the way they hear each other. “She dances on my tongue,” but that is hardly all that does.

Note: 25 secular essays about 25 songs, each one exactly 200 words long, appearing one per day (on average) during Advent (or the moral equivalent).