Seventeen-year-old Billie Eilish doesn’t sound like anyone else. Her debut EP, 2017’s Don’t Smile at Me, met with huge acclaim, and the LA artist’s first album lives up to that staggering promise. When We Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? finds her flitting between gothic, cartoonish show tunes, slow-burning, glossy pop and sculptural, choral electronic strangeness. It’s an entrancing, off-kilter album that luxuriates in youthful imagination, longing and darkness, yet doesn’t take itself too seriously: opener !!!!!!! celebrates taking out her much-maligned Invisalign braces, while My Strange Addiction features surreal interludes from an episode of the US Office over a whirring beat.
It’s a very honest album: Eilish reveals all facets of herself, beautiful, weird, forlorn, selfish and self-aware: recent single Wish You Were Gay laments that her love interest just isn’t into her (“Don’t say I’m not your type/ Just say I’m not your preferred sexual orientation”) atop piano and a laughter track. Her voice is soft, lilting and sweet, though she’s not afraid to push it through odd, squelching effects either. Fascinatingly ambitious, and often extremely fun, this debut finds pop in safe and thrilling hands.
