STACK #235 May 2024

MUSIC FEATURE

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HIT ME, BILLIE: ALBUM TIME!

Nine-time Grammy winner and muse of any generation you wish to poke a stick at, Billie Eilish, is on the cusp of releasing her third album. It follows her 2019 debut When We All Fall Asleep Where Do We Go? , and 2021’s HappierThan Ever . In anticipation of this delirium-inducing event, we’ve collected a basketful of the crumbs Billie’s dropped about how the record came together. Words Zoë Radas

figure - of the kinds typically seen on public bathroom doors - slanting oddly to the left. It’s a design Eilish has been using in videos and on merch since 2016, and now you can see it on all kinds of official Billie stuff, from necklaces to rings, T-shirts, sweats, and more. Blohsh has its own Instagram account (in which the figure’s name is written as ‘blōhsh’, indicating the long ‘o’ sound to rhyme with “oak”), which details all the new apparel and merch drops. But there was one more element to the billboards that tapped-in fans used to make the connection: the posters’ lyrics were printed in a particular shade of blue. Anyone who followed Billie on social media recognised the colour from the artist’s just-changed profile pictures, which presented a simple swatch of that precise hue.

WHAT THE BLOHSH? When billboards appeared around the world in early April bearing cryptic lyrics - oh, how we love a pop-up, cryptic lyric - fans were quick to identify the artwork as relating to

GETTING THE DL FROM DUA “Everything is different,” Billie said mid-last year, when she was (unbeknownst to us) recording Hit Me Hard and Soft . The comments came during a conversation with Dua Lipa, on the English pop artist’s At Your Service podcast. “I’ve been trying to compare recently, just because I’m getting used to doing it in a different way,” Billie continued on the topic of her music-making process. “[I’m] trying to be like, ‘It’s OK to do that. I’m OK. I’m still able to do it; I’m capable, still.’” She then revealed that all of Happier Than Ever was recorded in the basement studio of her brother Finneas’s house. Eilish found that after touring for a year and a half and coming back to that space, she became aware of an enormous personal leap. “The jump between

Billie’s new album. But how could they tell, when these lyrics were brand new, the colour scheme was brand new, and Billie’s name wasn’t anywhere to be seen within the vicinity of the posters? The answer is: a weird little stick figure. Called the ‘blohsh’, the symbol is a gender-neutral

Eilish in a blohsh beanie (Credit: @blohsh instagram)

MAY 2024

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