MUSIC PREMIERES
You’d be forgiven for having a sense of déjà vu walking up to the last of Billie Eilish’s six nights at London’s The O2. Three summers ago, the pop star first held a six-night residency at this same venue, then celebrating her second album, ‘Happier Than Ever’. Thanks to the pandemic addling our collective sense of time, it seems far too soon for her to be back for another stint – and selling it out – but here Eilish is, nonetheless, concluding another successful run.
It might not feel like much time has passed since, but much has changed. For a start, Eilish’s brother Finneas no longer tours with her, his absence filled by an expanded band. On occasion, Eilish gets to show off her skills on various instruments now. During a medley of ‘Lovely’, ‘Blue’ and ‘Ocean Eyes’, she sits down at a keyboard at the end of the stage, while the roaring penultimate track ‘Happier Than Ever’ sees her strap on a blue electric guitar and, as the song reaches its thundering crescendo, get down on her knees and shred.
The staging, too, is more ambitious and more impressive. Eilish performs in the middle of the floor, rather than on a typical stage at one end of the room. Her platform is giant, with space for two pits for her band and a gap in the middle where, sometimes, a cube of screens rises up and down – at times, a blindingly bright wall of light, at others, a cage from which Eilish performs within. The whole stage is covered in LED panels that change colour or show different graphics – during ‘Lunch’, the star’s image is repeated both across the screens that hang above it and all over the floor beneath her.
Performing in the round is a clever production move that puts her closer to the audience and whips up the hysteria to even giddier heights. To get to the stage, she can no longer rely on backstage corridors, but has to be carried through the crowd in a box. By now, fans are wise to this, so when they see Eilish’s crew start making their way to the path to the stage, they rush to the barriers and scream their lungs out. Throughout the show, she goes right to the very edges of the platform, almost within arm’s reach of the audience, who stretch out to her in hopes of making contact.
Towards the end of the night, Charli XCX’s face covers the stage as ‘Guess’ booms over the PA, Eilish suddenly out of view. Just as her verse in the ‘Brat’ collaboration begins, she pops up on a b-stage at the end of the room, ready to whip her hair and rave above the fans in that area. She remains there for a heartfelt ‘Everything I Wanted’ before racing back through the crowd, taking the time to do a lap and touch palms with as many people on the front rows as possible.
She takes mishaps in her stride – during ‘Ocean Eyes’, she starts cracking up, eventually throwing herself from her stool and rolling across the stage. “I really spaced out for a second, sorry guys,” she laughs afterwards. “I was thinking about all sorts of things that weren’t that song.” Eilish’s performances have always straddled the line between pop pro and watching your mate, and rather than this being a disappointing moment, her candour and charisma swing the pendulum to the latter state once more.
There’s still plenty of that slick pop professionalism, though. Before ‘When The Party’s Over’, she sits cross-legged in the middle of the stage and makes a request of the crowd. “I’m using a loop on my voice and creating a harmony stack,” she begins to explain. “It can only work if the entire room is completely silent for one minute.” Her fans dutifully respond until, harmonies layered, she begins to sing the first note of the song, and the room erupts with screams once more.
“I’m so grateful to have gotten to play here for six nights in a row,” she tells the crowd before her grand finale. “It’s a very special honour and I’m so lucky to get to do this with you guys and have this life and have this connection.” She waxes lyrical about her relationship with London – the place she played her first-ever headline show as a 15-year-old in 2017 – and touches on where her journey has taken her since. “It’s insane where it’s gone and where it is now.”
As if to reinforce that point, she finishes the show with ‘Birds Of A Feather’, the world-beating love song that forms one of the key highlights of her latest album, ‘Hit Me Hard And Soft’. It’s the perfect example of how Eilish has grown in the last three years and since the start of her career – always an artist who’s been able to write killer songs, but one who consistently finds a way to level up and tap deeper into universal emotions. Her latest O2 residency may be over now, but next time we see Eilish in London, we bet it’ll be with shows – and songs – that take her to even greater heights.
‘Chihiro’
‘Lunch’
‘NDA’
‘Therefore I Am’
‘Wildflower’
‘When The Party’s Over’
‘The Diner’
‘ilomilo’
‘Bad Guy’
‘The Greatest’
‘Your Power’
‘Skinny’
‘Halley’s Comet’
‘Bury A Friend’
‘Oxytocin’
‘Guess’
‘Everything I Wanted’
‘Lovely’ / ‘Blue’ / ‘Ocean Eyes’
‘L’amour De Ma Vie’
‘What Was I Made For?’
‘Happier Than Ever’
‘Birds Of A Feather’
MUSIC PREMIERES
Lykke Li didn’t hold back when speaking about the making of her sixth studio album, ‘The Afterparty’, during a listening session in Los Angeles earlier this year. “Let’s talk about the album. It was a motherfucker to make,” she admitted to the crowd. While balancing motherhood, the chaos of modern culture shaped by Trump and AI, and her own desire to create something more “extroverted, impulsive and chaotic” than ‘EYEYE’, as she previously shared with NME, the Swedish alt pop star arrived at a headspace that “feels like it’s 4am and the sun is going to rise”. The record captures that blurry final moment before regret, exhaustion and reality settle in, which makes it even more emotional considering she has hinted this could potentially be her final album.
There is something fitting about how brief the project feels. With only nine tracks running across 24 minutes, it never overstays its welcome. Lykke immediately drops listeners into the atmosphere with opener ‘Not Gon Cry’, painting a picture of those lonely early morning hours with the line, “No angels here tonight, no dancing queens.” Alongside the shadowy pulse of ‘Happy Now’ and the twisted disco energy of ‘Lucky Now’, she revisits the emotional yet dance driven spirit of her earlier material while blending in the sharper, more confident attitude heard on ‘So Sad, So Sexy’ and the shimmering influence of her 2019 Mark Ronson collaboration ‘Late Night Feelings’.
The emotional fallout begins to settle in quickly. ‘Famous Last Words’ carries a lush orchestral sadness as Lykke reflects on lessons that only came after years of chaos and late nights, confessing, “I had to crash and burn to tell the tale.” Then comes ‘Future Fear’, a delicate acoustic track with robotic textures that stares directly into anxiety and uncertainty with the chilling question, “I’m going to a dark place, do you need anything?” Meanwhile, ‘So Happy I Could Die’ glows like sunrise after a sleepless night, holding onto fleeting moments as she sings about “slipping through the hourglass”.
Throughout the album, Lykke Li vividly captures the beauty and wreckage of reckless nights with the vulnerability that has always defined her music. On ‘Sick Of Love’, she channels heartbreak into revenge, wanting to “make you beg for it” after rejection in a way that feels spiritually connected to Robyn’s ‘Dancing On My Own’. One of the strongest moments arrives with ‘Knife In The Heart’, a track that fully embraces her desire to become the “rock god” and “fuck boy” she spoke about, firing back at anyone who tries to tear her down with the words “you can spit, you can walk on me” while delivering one of the catchiest songs she has created in years.
Closing track ‘Euphoria’ leaves behind the same bittersweet feeling that runs through the rest of the album. With sweeping strings, pulsing beats and emotional intensity, Lykke Li reminds listeners that nothing lasts forever as she sings, “Player play your song, waste the night away”. Like the fading energy of the perfect night out, ‘The Afterparty’ ends in a haze of beauty and uncertainty. If this truly is her farewell, she leaves with one final intoxicating statement, though it still feels like there could be another chapter waiting.
