The stratospheric rise of Billy Eish from the Soundcloud teenager to the top of one of the world’s biggest music events was nothing short of amazing – and no one looks more surprised tonight than the pop sensation itself. “It’s so weird. I shouldn’t be leading this nonsense, “she said in Coachella on Saturday night with crazy distrust. “It’s been three years, man.”
She’s right, her trajectory since making her Coachella debut in 2019 has been breathtakingly fast, now with two top-ranked albums, a Bond theme, seven Grammy Awards and the hearts of almost every child with TikTok on her endless list. with achievements. Now to add one more: at 20, this performance makes her the youngest headliner of the festival in the history of Coachella. But it was these shy confessions and closeness to how you feel that made her one of the world’s greatest stars. And she has a gut show to match: partly a vampire rave, partly a Disney fantasy that takes audiences to dizzying heights (and not just because she performs a bunch of cherry songs).
Ailish is famous for their quiet / strong, whispering / impudent dynamics and they are on widescreen levels here, in emotional yo-yo, which nervously beats one minute and surprisingly intimate in the next. She starts with pop punk filled with all drums, fully gating pop punk by Happier Than Ever, dressed in a white shirt with graffiti, shorts and knee pads, her hair in black locks, like a missing member of Suicide Squad. The stage is dramatically raw, bathed in blood red, with only Brother Phineas and drummer Andrew Marshall on the bar behind her. The promenade, jutting out into the audience, gives Ailish a catwalk to tuck in or have fun with, from time to time swinging, consciously playing with perceptions of her as sexualized or not (as she did when shone in a corset for the cover of VOGUE last year).
But as soon as she writhes on the floor under the inflated electric pulse of My Strange Addiction, it turns into a rocking ballad for piano Lovely, for which singer Khalid joins her on stage. Similarly, the nerve-wracking industrial punisher You Should See Me In A Crown, who makes people bump into each other as if they were in an Euphoria party scene, is followed by Billie Bossa Nova’s soft samba.
Billy Ailish appears on stage. Photo: Kevin Mazur / Getty Images for Coachella
These changes in tone could be shocking if it weren’t for Ailish’s dynamic magnetism and exceptional voice. In her two albums, When We All Fall Asleep, 2019, Where Do We Go? and Happier Than Ever from 2021, home restaurants have often been her grumbling register – which has undoubtedly changed the sound of modern pop. Still, her voice can also cut glass, rise in places like a Pixar movie, and never miss a note. This is no more obvious than her glamorous Bon Iver-style folk, Your Power, which she performs in front of an acoustic guitar stage with her brother, the architect of her sound, her ethereal falsetto virtually sparkling.
Her charm also brings the most unexpected moment of her performance, when she brings to the stage a man who, in a move that instantly ages everyone over the age of 30 by an additional two decades, she portrays as Damilla Albarn of Gorillaz. Albarn – who recently distracted young pop titan Taylor Swift in a similar vein – has joined her to sing in Getting Older, as home videos of her and Phineas as children are patches on the screens (perhaps why some fans in Twitter obviously confused him with that of Ailish dad). He remains for the cheerful funk of Gorillaz’s Feel Good Inc, which gets the biggest bop of the evening. That is, unless I count the countless dancers who surround her for oxytocin. Ailish’s show, which has just toured the United States, is known for its minimalism, which never distracts from the star, so it’s exciting when earlier on the set the army, wrapped in latex, surrounded it and pogo, as if an alien spaceship may fall.
There is an interesting contrast between the sharpness of Ailish’s songs and the way she speaks to her audience – often as if she were about to lead an ecstatic dance session. “I want to be grateful to be alive,” she said before When The Party’s Over (his heavenly intro here sounds no different than the beginning of Madonna’s Like A Prayer). She then asks them to breathe deeply (which they probably would have done if so many of them had not returned to their cars). It may sound a bit fictional, but it rather emphasizes Ailish’s distinct lack of ego as a performer, as well as the moment at the end when she throws a cowboy hat over her head and jumps to her final gothic-pop anthem, Bad Guy. She is here to play, to kill and best to stay.
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