Billie Eilish - When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?

The Quietus

When she first emerged in 2016 with her viral Soundcloud hit ‘Ocean Eyes’, the moody, silver-haired Eilish seemed like just another dreamy teenage LA singer/songwriter. The trickle of songs that led to her follow-up EP Don’t Smile At Me, however, proved that Eilish was made of darker stuff. Combining text and Instagram word-speak with bold electropop, she was busily crafting a girl-positive emotional world for the Netflix generation, and she has slowly become an alternative icon.

Recent shows at London Shepherds Bush O2 bore this out, with a raucous mosh-pit of teenage girls and Eilish in a baggy T shirt, huge shorts, and DMs, egging them on with sardonic anthems and mad dancing. For her long-awaited debut album 17 year-old Eilish has gone deeper into the weirdo-pop trench. Together with co-collaborator brother and producer Finneas O’Connell, she has drawn on trap and industrial pop to create a darkly humorous record about romance, rejection and addiction.

Raised by a family of actor/musicians, Eilish and her brother lace the songs with pop culture references and a sense of drama. ‘Xanny’, for instance, reprises Bacharach’s ‘Alfie’, in a soporific, distorted showtune, while ‘Wish You Were Gay’ links Joan Jett-style glam footstomping to a delicate chorus. “To spare my pride/Don’t say I’m not your type/Just not your preferred sexual orientation,” Eilish sings, with mournful deliberation. ‘Bury A Friend’, the album’s stand-out track, develops the theme of darkly, dysfunctional friendship, with her vocodered voice looped through effects and filters.

Just when you think that the clever, lugubrious tone is getting slightly wearisome (‘Listen Before I Go’), Eilish breaks out into a track of clear, melodic beauty with ‘I Love You’. Here she links the Lana Del Rey dreaminess of her early songs with the savvy, hip-hop inspired artist that she has become. And this is just the start.

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The Guardian 80

(Darkroom/Interscope)

Old people (in this case, anyone over about 23) may be quick to cite Billie Eilish’s obvious influences as evidence of the 17-year-old’s unoriginality: Lana Del Rey’s broken balladry, Lorde’s hip-hop-adjacent pop minimalism and witch house’s lo-fi spookiness all seethe through her debut. Eilish doesn’t hide the fact that she is a product of an online adolescence, steeped in a pop cultural morass with no beginning or end. But what she does with those influences is unique.

Related: Billie Eilish review – a teenage talent not quite eclipsed by screaming fans

The Guardian 80

(Polydor)

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.

Pitchfork 72

The debut album from the meteoric pop star lives in a world of its own: gothic, bass-heavy, at turns daring and quite beautiful.