Hook & Reel: Billie Eilish’s serene yet searing ‘ilomilo’

Welcome to Hook & Reel, a series showcasing music that’s guaranteed to catch your ear.

Earlier this week, I broke a little. I was scrolling through Twitter looking for either new music news or drawings inspired by my favorite video games, and my eyes landed on a photograph that turned my brain into what felt like painfully cold steel. Very young students, possibly in kindergarten, were pictured outside of the STEM School Highlands Ranch charter school, just after two teenage students shot and killed a high school student and injured multiple others. Two boys were holding each other protectively, one girl looked like she was crying, and they all had a very real, very adult fear in their eyes.

I scrolled further, hoping to find something that would make me forget that photo. I forced myself to pass by what looked like a relatively recent video of a black woman who was shot by a cop at a traffic stop, but then found myself bombarded by tweets regarding a just-released UN report, which stated one million animal and plant species are at the risk of extinction. I put my phone down in exasperated defeat, and only minutes after my boyfriend texted me, telling me about a shooting that had just happened at the apartment complex across from his office.

Charlotte, North Carolina is beautiful in the late spring; the sky is a deep, unblemished blue, the blazing sun makes the downtown buildings glitter like diamonds and the trees are so green they glow. I drive everywhere with my windows open, the breeze dancing across my face and neck, my favorite pop songs pouring from the stereo. Lately though, those moments of supposed serenity often feel coated with a distant, sickly uneasiness, like hearing a constant scratching at your locked front door in the middle of the night, while you lie tightly bundled under your bedcovers.

Those moments are what Billie Eilish’s “ilomilo” sounds like – bright, but deceitfully so; sweet, but tinged with bitter foreboding; cool, but as a fruitless attempt to escape reality. She and her producer (and brother) Finneas fashion the standout song from her debut album WHEN WE ALL FALL ASLEEP, WHERE DO WE GO? as a sort of demented lullaby. The two and a half minute track plays sparse, airy and light, but reeks of leaden, existential dread. From the first two lines “told you not to worry / But maybe that’s a lie,” Billie portrays life in the world today as a child, as a teenager or as an adult – going through growing pains, encountering love and loss, all while trying not to constantly think about these damning headlines and social media posts. There’s a delicate beauty to the track, keys skipping lightly around Billie’s gentle croon as a muted drum loop patters in the backdrop, but everything is wracked with simmering tension and quiet sadness.

Billie Eilish just unveiled her upcoming Billboard cover and photo shoot, which contains the quote: “[My music] is all about comfort, and it’s about ‘I know how you’re feeling, and you are not alone.’” That comfort and that sense of understanding come from her acknowledgement of millennial and gen Z despair, so that those of us who do often feel helpless by the atrocities of the modern world, the world that we must grow old in, know that we truly aren’t alone.

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