Live review: Billie Eilish’s stunning sounds of silence and joy at Australian tour debut
Now 23, and having ridden the wave of fame to its highest crest, it’s undoubtedly an older, wiser Billie Eilish who began her fifth Australian tour in Brisbane on Tuesday.
Provoking an arena filled with ardent pop music fans to scream their buns off is no major feat; that sort of mass vocal hysteria happens when any star of sufficient radiance appears once the house lights go down.
Getting 13,000 or so people to agreeably shut up for a minute amid a high-octane, highwire act of a performance, though? Only the rarest artists possess that sort of ability to command a crowd into pure, pin-drop silence.
Billie Eilish is one of those artists, and about 20 minutes into the first concert of her 12-date Australian tour at the Brisbane Entertainment Centre on Tuesday night, the US singer-songwriter sat cross-legged in the middle of the stage and explained her need for quiet in order to record looped, harmonised vocals for the beginning of When the Party’s Over, one of her most beautiful songs.
What followed was an eye-watering moment remarkable for both its purity of artistic expression and her willingness to press pause on a modern pop show stacked with technological bells and whistles in order to pull focus back to where her career in the public eye began a decade ago: as a 13-year-old possessed with an extraordinary voice beyond her years, who happened to grow up in the same house as her musical genius of a brother.
Now 23, and having ridden the wave of fame to its highest crest – headlining the world’s biggest festivals, selling out shows worldwide, topping charts and earning nine Grammy Awards since 2020 – it is undoubtedly an older, wiser Billie Eilish O’Connell who’s now visiting Australia for the fifth time.
It also appears that she’s a happier, healthier, prouder and more equipped musical specimen who stands before us. Where previously her self-consciousness had not permitted Eilish to face her fans’ bald adoration for more than a few moments before scrunching up her face and moving on, now she’s able to stand, stare, smile and deservedly drink it all in.
The show began with a wonderfully disorienting entrance: in the centre of a stage set in-the-round, a cube of light drew our attention as her four-piece band made their presence felt. Then the digital screens on its four sides began distorting, and briefly revealed the headline artist inside; she ascended on a platform before popping up atop the cube, stood beneath a handful of giant screens that captured the onstage action in high-definition.
The scale and execution of the production design was surprising: perhaps 60m in length, the rectangular stage floor could be controlled like a screen and featured two sunken pits for the four musicians, as well as two backing singers who appeared halfway through. Flamethrowers licked skyward behind the musicians, while surrounding the stage were eight pillars stacked with lights which alternately shone into the crowd and directed beams back at the performers.
Clad in basketball shorts and shoes – and topped by a green-and-gold shirt that resembled an Australian Kangaroos rugby league jersey, albeit with her first name stitched onto the back – Eilish herself was a ball of energy. She rarely stood still for long, and instead opted to run figure-eights of the space while ensuring she serviced all corners of the crowd gathered on the floor.
When this tour was announced last year, her decision to play indoor arenas – four shows each in Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne – rather than stadiums was a head-scratcher. Bigger venues generally means a bigger box office gross and fewer shows, and thus less time spent on the road, which is where many artists tend to come unstuck through repetition, tedium and other distractions.
Yet one look at the stage footprint on Tuesday and her choice of venues made perfect sense: the amount of rigging work involved in hanging this show from the ceiling was extreme, and with that many moving parts, taking the chance outdoors – with all the attendant weather risks of an Australian summer – was a clear no-go.
Touring in support of her third album, 2024’s Hit Me Hard and Soft – which evolved and elevated her skills as a pop singer-songwriter beyond their already great heights – Eilish played nine of its 10 tracks, and used the one outlier, Bittersuite, as a transition track played on the PA while she briefly ducked into a trapdoor near the bassist.
Most of her set was spent prowling the stage, microphone in hand, but on a few occasions we were reminded of her instrumental abilities as she played electric and acoustic guitars, and sat at a keyboard for tender, passionate renditions of album closer Blue into Ocean Eyes, her breakthrough hit that’s now nearly a decade old.
This show had it all: from the arena-sized club feel of hard-hitting tracks like Bury a Friend, Oxytocin, Bad Guy and Guess – her sexually suggestive collaboration with British artist Charli XCX, which was ravenously received after Charli had only recently left our shores while headlining Laneway Festival – through to delicate ballads, including the minute’s silence described earlier, which ended with Eilish singing into the rafters while lying on her back on a starkly white-lit stage.
The sound quality was impeccable, her band was never less than impressive, and the spectacle itself was consistently engaging. At 100 minutes and 24 songs, it was a generous setlist evenly distributed across her three albums and sundry singles.
It wasn’t until near the end that Eilish’s self-consciousness got the better of her, and she admitted to carrying a cold that she’d contracted three days before this tour began. “I’m sorry if I sound like shit,” she said, unnecessarily. “Anyway, let’s keep going.”
In another nice touch toward the end, she thanked her brother and collaborator Finneas O’Connell, who’s currently touring the US under his own name; and she thanked her parents, even though they weren’t there, either.
This was unusual: what 23-year-old artist bothers to thank her absent mum, dad and brother while performing on the other side of the world? A particularly well-adjusted one, is the answer, as viewers of the 2021 documentary The World’s A Little Blurry know well.
Eilish was raised in a two-bedroom bungalow in Los Angeles; she and Finneas were homeschooled by their two artistically inclined parents, Maggie Baird and Patrick O’Connell, who encouraged the creative ambitions of their children from a young age. “Our family was just one big f..king song, and I still make music in my brother’s bedroom,” she said in the film’s opening minutes, and that she’s moved to publicly profess her love for each of them while stood in the middle of a giant stage in Brisbane speaks volumes.
Her last visit in 2022 saw each night ending with Happier Than Ever, the title track to her second album. It’s one of the great modern break-up tracks and an ideal set closer due to its storming hard-rock ending, complete with Eilish on her knees, wailing on an electric guitar.
On Tuesday night we still got that moment, but it’s no longer the finale. There’s a good reason for that: she’s now armed with an even better ending in Birds of a Feather, a gorgeous and uplifting pop song that recently ticked past two billion streams on Spotify, having topped the music platform’s list of most-streamed tracks last year.
Written as a love song centred on a belief in enduring love, Birds of a Feather seems to fit perfectly with her onstage persona today. The mask of angst is still readily donned; this is a young woman who’s been famous nearly half her life, after all, and you’d probably have some quibbles about that experience if you were transported into her basketball shoes, too.
But the edgy teen who dabbled in dark, depressive imagery as she began topping charts six years ago has been replaced by a mature artist who revels in performing her uniquely affecting music to the masses. With each successive release and tour, Eilish emphatically underlines her ability as a once-in-a-generation artist without limit. Watching her up there, flying, one can only wonder where her talent next takes her, and us.
Billie Eilish’s Hit Me Hard and Soft tour continues in Brisbane (Wednesday, Friday and Saturday), followed by Sydney (February 24, 25, 27 and 28) and Melbourne (March 4, 5, 7, and 8).
More Coverage
