I’d forgotten how loud they can get.
The first time I saw Billie Eilish perform, at The Armory in the summer of 2019, you could barely hear “Bad Guy” over the ecstatic word-for-word shriek-along of her 8,000 or so fans. When the crowd rushed the stage in response to the song’s initial pulse, we elders in the room were left behind in the rear like so many scraps of beached jellyfish when the tide rolls out.
There were more than twice as many voices to be raised Monday night as Eilish wrapped up her sold-out, two-date stay at the Xcel Energy Center in St. Paul. Today, “Bad Guy,” which Eilish tucked about a third of the way through a 22-song set clocking in a bit less than two hours, is a pre-pandemic oldie to the young but not as-young girls, women, and femmes who still competed with her in decibels. They’ve been through a lot since 2019, and Eilish was there for them.
“I will always fight for you and try my best to protect you,” she told the crowd later in the evening, not needing to specify from whom and from what they needed protecting. “I will always have your back.”
Be cynical and say this is just a step removed from standard showbiz talk, and ask how much can a pop star really protect us from 2025 and beyond? (Don’t answer that.) Maybe naming names would make that pledge of support feel a little more concrete, but only an asshole would say the fans here didn’t need or deserve that reassurance.
Or that she didn’t deliver. Eilish performed all 10 songs from her 2024 album, Hit Me Hard and Soft, beginning with “Chihiro,” named for Spirited Away’s child protagonist, whose journey into a shapeshifting shadow realm is surely one that someone who found fame at 17 would find resonant. (Eilish will only be 23 before the year ends.) From there the orally fixated “Lunch,” and the lipsmacking response from the crowd, offered evidence that the kids are no less queer than they were on November 4.
In the year the pop girls raged and ruled, Eilish rarely grabbed a headline. No one called this “Hard and Soft Summer.” The way Charli XCX coolly condescends to the masses or Chappell Roan’s every move shouts GAYGAYGAYGAYGAY in ALL CAPS felt more culturally significant to pop connoisseurs, and Sabrina Carpenter had all the normies on lock. But over the long term it’s the sincere weirdos (a term I use with the utmost respect) who always get the most love, and over the course of her three albums Eilish has set the 21st-century standard for growing up pop in public.
Her debut full-length, 2019's When We All Fall Asleep Where Do We Go?, revealed a homeschooled goth and her ever-clever brother (Billie’s sole producer and accomplice, Finneas) making pop of their grim playtime fantasies and SoundCloud listening diet. Its follow up from 2021, Happier Than Ever, was an uncommonly perceptive peek into the life of a newbie star, softer and more mature. And now May's Hit Me Hard and Soft is thoughtful and horny, bitter and open-hearted, lush, extravagant, and subtle, psychologically acute but never settling for mere therapy jargon. (If Billie someday acknowledges her Saturn return in song, I will be so disappointed.)
Eilish has also developed as a singer, her breathiness a style not an affectation. And while crowd levels inviting an OSHA warning might have overwhelmed most nuance, she wasn’t about to let her craft go unnoticed. Five songs into the night, she plopped down center stage and asked the crowd to hush up—a difficult demand when fans are running this hot. “This is the only time I will ask for silence—because I don’t like it,” she said.
But with some assistance from a curt “shut the fuck up” a fan directed toward some persistent loudmouth, Eilish got her temporary quiet. She then recorded layered harmonies for “When the Party’s Over,” a “see I can really do this” moment that was also a remarkable display of trust and power. The crowd immediately exploded once the song began in earnest, of course.
An in-the-round setup reinforced the evening’s intimacy. At the center of the arena was a rectangular stage, and at the center of the stage was a cagelike and vaguely sinister metal cube that looked as though it’d be left unassembled in a horror movie. When engaged it emitted a solid white light; sometimes it served as a platform that lifted Eilish above the stage. A live band was situated in pits on either side, like on the bridge of an Imperial Star Destroyer.
Choreo is not Eilish’s bag, but she has her own winning manner of moving, a kind of stagger that can turn into a jog around the perimeter or a relatable flurry of dancefloor abandon when the beat drops. Her fashion sense reminds me of when my niece was in first grade and she and her friends used to wear as many of their clothes as they could to school. On Monday, that meant Eilish wearing an oversized blue-and-white striped rugby shirt, with a ballcap on top of a ski hat. At the end of the night, she gathered up the bras that had been flung at her and wore a few on top of her head, as though to say “I am certainly a woman who likes wearing things on my head!”
(While we’re on the subject of clothes, the retro fashions have really entered the uncanny valley: A young woman behind me wore loose, ripped jeans and a tight black top, an outfit that was essentially Brenda Walsh cosplay.)
The response to “Wildflower” made clear that this was a show for the girls who wanted to expel any and all residue of heartbreak from their lungs at full volume, flinging the lyrics back at Eilish with their whole bodies. There would be more of this during a mid-show mini-set of acoustic ballads that inevitably turned topical.
“We all know why this week was hard, I want you to know that you’re safe in this room with me, 100%,” Eilish said before dedicating “Your Power” to “All the women in this room… anyone who knows a woman.”
“TV” was a fitting followup. “The internet's gone wild watching movie stars on trial,” Eilish sang, with the following line the loudest scream-along all night: “While they're overturning Roe v. Wade.” When she sang the chorus, “Maybe I’m the problem,” at least one person shouted back “No you’re not!”; a repeated “baby, I’m the problem” then became an eerie chant of guilt throughout the arena, somehow affirmational in its acceptance.
As arena pop shows go, this was somewhat sexually subdued. (The only way it was subdued, let me add.) Charli XCX’s “Guess,” with Billie's seductively assured guest verse, was a juicy welcome, since her own songbook is short on “bite it, lick it, spit it” soft porn. But whoever brought the sign that read “POP A TITTIE” was disappointed, though surely bringing a sign that reads “POP A TITTIE” to a Billie Eilish show is its own reward.
Following a medley of songs from her first EP, Don’t Smile at Me, performed unaccompanied on keyboard, the show entered its closing stretch. On “L’Amour de Ma Vie,” a syllable-savoring slow bit (“I was the love of your life, but you were not mine”) ramped up into an electrodance climax. The title track from Happier Than Ever also came in two parts: a blithe acoustic farewell and a declamatory rant with Eilish thrashing about on an electric guitar.
There are screams of desire and screams of rage, screams of power and screams of powerlessness. These all certainly overlap, and sometimes a scream can’t be categorized. The evening wrapped up with Eilish’s fluttery recent hit “Birds of a Feather.” “We should stick together,” she insisted over the slickest or at least sleekest pop track of her career, which sounded less like a commercial capitulation then some placid tuneful place where we could all just coast, a place that demands far less screaming, a place that we might even someday reach. Until then, we'd better follow the song's advice. We’d better all stick together.
Setlist
Chihiro
Lunch
NDA
Therefore I Am
Wildflower
When the Party's Over
The Diner
Ilomoto
Bad Guy
The Greatest
Your Power
Skinny
TV
Bury a Friend
Oxytocin
Guess
Everything I Wanted
Lovely/Idontwannabeyouanymore/Ocean Eyes
L'Amour de Ma Vie
What Was I Made For?
Happier Than Ever
Birds of a Fearther
