The first and last time I witnessed Billie Eilish live and onstage was the occasion of 2019’s When We All Fall Asleep Tour. Dressed in sackcloth and ash, away from her brother/guitarist Finneas and drummer Andrew Marshall on the wide stage of the Met in Philly, Eilish—like her 2018-era, post-industrial, electronic pop and lonely space-girl lyrics—was a distanced figure (or a figure in the distance); a big-eyed lone wolf with a whisper/screamo/soft-serve croon, a dark, femme-child version of Trent Reznor for Gen Z, hiding herself below baggy costumes.
Saturday night’s Wells Fargo Billie Eilish—the two-time Oscar-winning Eilish on her Hit Me Hard And Soft Tour—was a far cry from the beetlejuice-beetlejuice-wee-goth-kid of five years ago. Now, beneath a Phat Farm woolen hat and wearing a modified Sixers jersey with camo, Eilish was still crafting icy, squelching electro-bangers with the aid of a tiny swish of a voice that could scale mountains at the flip of a sequencer. Now, however, such scaling was for the benefit of taking the intimacy of menace and obsession—the smallest of emotional schemes, the nuance that details only the most deeply imagined dreams—to big rooms and bigger audiences. The Philly show, the second U.S. date on her current tour, was like a debutante-ball rager for someone who wasn’t quite sure they were ready to come out loudly, but had fun doing so once the party started.
One stage trick that she pulled early on gave audiences a clue into the personality light-switch changes from the Eilish of 2019 to the Eilish of 2024: “This is the only time that I’m going to say this,” she said, bathed in white spotlight while sitting cross-legged at stage center, introducing the quietly looped “When The Party’s Over” and her hypnotic live harmonies. “Because I don’t want silence. Ever.”
No longer at work and play within a shaded-lamp bedroom with her brother making up songs (Finneas was not in attendance this night), Eilish sounded ready to roar; she may never again count on the silence to light her way again.
Gliding, hopping, skipping and twirling across a large rectangular stage with a cage riser in its middle and two slots for dressed-white band members and girl-pal background vocalists, Eilish started off with the oozy tech-tronic likes of the chilly “Chihiro,” the sensualist “Lunch” (with its “tastes like she might be the one” refrain) and “NDA” before sitting for “Party’s Over.”
As she would throughout the evening, Eilish (when she wasn’t being filmed for the score of mega-monitors that displayed her visage with a 70mm cinematic filter) grabbed a video camera and filmed selfies of her fine-featured face with her screaming audience behind her. Sure, this effect has been used in the past, but with Eilish controlling the GoPro, it didn’t come across as self-loving, but quite the opposite: It was a communal, communicative thing between her and her devoted crowds, as in, “Look, we’re all in this together, making a scene.”
A charmed and acoustically rendered “Male Fantasy,” a surprisingly thick take on “Skinny,” the familiar whistle on the house-music-driven “Bad Guy,” a low, moaning “The Greatest” and the poppy, serpentine slither of “L’Amour De Ma Vie” were Eilish’s highpoints in an evening full of sonic victories. Turning “Blue,” “Lovely,” “Idontwannabeyouanymore” and “Ocean Eyes” into a sauntering, sweet-and-sour hurt medley was a grace-filled pleasure. Though I wished for her piano-driven “What Was I Made For?” (her sad and softly piteous song for 2023’s Barbie movie) to be less of an all-audience sing-along than it was, you can’t really make any pleas against the direction an anthem takes: it’s the will of the crowd that determines mass uplift.
Ending the night with the crunch of “Birds Of A Feather” was a neat trick, something that removed Eilish from the Vantablack throbbing of her past moods and music into the vibrant crackling light of her present for good. Or, at least, for now.
—A.D. Amorosi; photos by Henry Hwu
