Billie Eilish album review: WHEN WE ALL FALL ASLEEP, WHERE DO WE GO?

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Autumn Miller

I got into Billie Eilish fairly recently, but I kind of didn’t understand the hype surrounding her and her music at first. I knew a lot of other people liked her music, but I was almost avoiding listening to it.

I wanted to wait until her album came out to fully dive into her music and write about it blindly.

Vanity Fair did a video interview with Eilish on Oct. 18, 2017, and did the same interview exactly a year later on Oct. 18, 2018. In the 2017 video, Eilish was 15 years old and had 257,000 followers on Instagram, compared to the 2018 video where she was 16 and had 6.3 million followers.

That alone was enough for me to want to listen to her music and learn more about her.

After following Eilish’s career over the past few months, I realized there is nobody in the music industry doing what she’s doing. If there is somebody else, they aren’t doing it as well, and sure aren’t doing it at such a young age. On March 29, Eilish released her debut album, WHEN WE ALL FALL ASLEEP, WHERE DO WE GO?

Over the past week she has been everywhere: Times Square, featured on every music platform, trending on social media.

Since the release of the album and the 2018 Vanity Fair interview, Eilish has been growing more than she has in the past year. She currently has over 35 million monthly Spotify listeners and 16.3 million Instagram followers. Keith Caulfield from Billboard said the album is set to hit No. 1 on the Billboard 200 charts next week and it will be the second-biggest week for any album in 2019.

The album overall exceeded my expectations. Eilish managed to keep her traditional glossy-goth image and sound on the album while also exploring different types of music. On her older music, she’s more known for soft sounds, melancholy lyrics and a light voice. Tracks like “bad guy” and “all the good girls go to hell” have more of an electronic pop and bass sound to them.

She was able to embrace the modern music idea that artists are able to do whatever they want. The debut album showcased Eilish for what she is as a whole: young, and a music writer for young and bright souls. Along with that, she is also the same Eilish who wrote the more somber songs like “Ocean Eyes” and “Idontwannabeyouanymore.”

No matter what Eilish does, she’s been able to pull it off and make it her own signature thing. She’s made a huge impact on the music industry so far and being so young, she’s going to give a lot more to the pop music world.