Billie Eilish
photo: raph_ph · cc by 4.0 ↗Billie Eilish turned bedroom pop into arena-filling nightmare-pop, whispering over FINNEAS's minimalist, bass-heavy productions instead of belting over them. Her 2019 debut WHEN WE ALL FALL ASLEEP, WHERE DO WE GO? swept the Grammy 'Big Four' at nineteen, built on hushed vocals, horror-movie imagery, and a genre-agnostic ear that pulls from hip-hop, torch-song pop, and industrial noise alike. She remains one of her generation's most formally restless pop stars.
Eilish has said she'd 'be nothing without' Tyler, the Creator, crediting him as a defining influence on her sensibility — she says she has his catalog memorized front to back, and his fusion of horror-adjacent imagery, prankish humor, and unpolished bedroom production maps directly onto her own early DIY records with FINNEAS.
listen forPlay Tyler's woozy, one-take-sounding 'Yonkers' next to Eilish's 'bury a friend' — both bury a genuinely catchy song under queasy sound design and creeping-horror vocal effects, daring you to find the pop song inside the discomfort.
Critics and Eilish herself have pointed to Lana Del Rey's blueprint of hazy, hip-hop-inflected, melancholy pop as a direct forerunner of Eilish's own sound — the mid-tempo sadness, the cinematic self-mythologizing, the singing style pitched somewhere between a whisper and a sigh.
listen forPlay Lana's 'Video Games' next to Eilish's 'when the party's over' — both let a single held-back vocal float over sparse, rubato piano, turning heartbreak into something closer to a spell than a song.
Eilish has spoken about being a Bieber fan since childhood, and his early run of hooky, vocal-forward teen-pop singles is part of the pop grammar she and FINNEAS write inside even when the production gets darker — the two also later recorded a 'bad guy' remix together.
listen forSet Bieber's breakout 'Baby' against Eilish's 'everything i wanted' — strip away the eras' very different productions and you'll hear the same instinct for an intimate, almost conversational pop vocal built to sound like it's just for you.