Billie Eilish is a girl on fire

If you haven't heard of 15-year-old pop prodigy Billie Eilish yet, you're missing out.

The LA native has lit up my "most played" list this year with a handful of smart, dark pop songs, in which she fantasises about things like killing her boyfriend and burning his car. You know, typical teenage stuff...

Her new single, Watch, came out last Friday and it's packed with more Melodrama than Lorde's entire album. "Go ahead and watch my heart burn," she trills, "with the fire that you started in me".

Listen below.


If you want to know more about Billie, here's some highlights from her first forays into the media.

Billie wrote her first song when she was four. It was about falling into a black hole [Interview]

Her neighbour asked her to star in his homemade horror movies when she was six, which isn't creepy at all. [Vice]

For the last eight years, she's been a member of the fancypants Los Angeles Children's Chorus. [Teen Vogue]

As well as singing, Billie is a trained dancer, who used to practice 11 hours a week until "my hip decided to explode" last year. [WFN Music]

Billie writes all her songs with her older brother Finneas. "Him and I get along really well, so it's perfect," she says, before basically admitting no-one else will put up with her. "I'm a super-particular person and I always have to have stuff my way." [Triple J]

Her breakthrough song was the lullaby-like Ocean Eyes, which Finneas wrote for his band, but gave to Billie when she needed a piece for her dance class. "We put it on SoundCloud with a free download link next to it so my dance teacher could access it," she says. "We had no intentions for it, really. But basically overnight a ton of people started hearing it and sharing it." [Teen Vogue]

The song has now had 1.96m streams on Soundcloud, winning her a record deal with Interscope and a slot on the 13 Reasons Why soundtrack. [Soundcloud]

Her best song to date is Bellyache, which she describes as "a flat-out a song about murder". [Ladygunn]

It probably goes without saying, but you shouldn't take the lyrics literally. "You don’t have to kill people to write a song about killing people," says Billie. "I'm not going to kill people." [Billboard]

In fact, the song has a deeper meaning. "Like, if you do something to impress somebody else or because your parents want you to or because whatever, you’re going to end up alone one day... with a bellyache." [Ones To Watch]

Her favourite colour is yellow, as she will explain to you at length. "I think of myself as yellow because I think a lot of people used to maybe doubt yellow or not like it because it’s one of those colors that people just sort of hate. Nobody likes it and it’s such a good colour! I don’t even know how to describe it. I just feel like I am yellow. I do and say what I want and I don't really care if people like it or not. That makes me yellow." [Popcrush]

So there you go: That is Billie Eilish "in a nutshell", if the nutshell was about 600 words of text on a stunningly popular music blog.