“It’s the only time in my life I’m gonna ask for silence from you,” she said, “because I love the noise more than anything else in this world.”
The singer-songwriter, whose rapid ascent from her brother’s home studio to arena stages has been one of pop’s brightest stories of the last few years, was setting up to perform her minimalist 2018 single “when the party’s over.” Its backing track is made up largely of Eilish’s vocals, which on record are overdubbed so that they resemble a ghostly choir; the Los Angeles native wanted to replicate that effect live, but she needed the crowd to stay mum for the effect to fully work.
A few songs into her set at TD Garden on Friday night, the pop fantasist Billie Eilish asked the rapturous crowd for a surprising favor: She wanted the room to be silent for a minute or so.
The audience complied, allowing her mournful, wordless singing, and the breaths she took between each phrase, to fill the arena, layer being added to layer. After a few loops, Eilish seemed satisfied with her work, her smile doubling as a signal to the assembled to amp up their volume, but not so much that they would distract from the fragile, wounded beauty of the song at hand.
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These sorts of dichotomies—between bone-rattling basslines and hushed vocals, musical beauty and lyrical ugliness, carefree dancing and existential contemplation, audiences of thousands and crowds of two—have fueled Eilish’s music since the beginning. She and her brother-slash-collaborator Finneas O’Connell have a bone-deep creative rapport and collective vision that’s resulted in singular tracks, many of which eventually mushroomed into blockbusters.
Her first pop smash “bad guy,” which appeared on her 2019 debut “WHEN WE ALL FALL ASLEEP, WHERE DO WE GO?,” is equal parts menacing and playful, its rumbling bassline and horror-movie synths making her clipped whisper even more threatening. “What Was I Made For?,” her crystalline Oscar-winning contribution to the 2023 “Barbie” tie-in album, tackles womanhood rendered in both plasticine and flesh, with the song’s relatable uneasiness derived both from its bare-bones production and its lack of resolution. And her verse on Charli XCX’s rework of “Guess,” a glitchy come-on from the summer-zeitgeist-defining “Brat,” presents her as a swaggering lothario. (On Friday, Eilish turned it into the basis for a rafter-shaking dance party, one where the arena was bathed in lights in a hue that could only be called “’Brat’ green.”) Despite their varied styles and approaches, some of which required arena-heating pyrotechnics, each track on Friday filled and thrilled the Garden during Eilish’s compelling, fast-moving set.
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Eilish’s latest album “HIT ME HARD AND SOFT,” as its title might imply, digs even deeper into contradictions. Pointed critiques of modern-day culture like the sweeping opening track “SKINNY” butt up against the gathering storm of “THE GREATEST,” which on Friday felt like an emotional climax.
The album also had its own left-field breakout hit. While the pumping, flirtatious “LUNCH” was selected as the album’s lead single, after the album’s release listeners flocked to “BIRDS OF A FEATHER,” a love song with insistent synths, impassioned lyrics that could be delivered from the altar or the brink, and a gutsy vocal performance from Eilish, who combines her upper register’s vulnerability with a newfound power that highlights the big feelings stirring underneath its gloss. The cut closed Friday night’s set, its final push serving as a last chance for Eilish and her faithful to experience full-on catharsis—and both parties did so with gusto, the shared gratitude of audience and performer feeding off each other while confetti floated down from the rafters.
BILLIE EILISH
With Nat & Alex Wolff
At TD Garden, Friday, Oct. 11