MIX MASTERS

Billie Eilish started 2019 as one of several young artists operating just below the radar, having enjoyed initial success with her debut single ‘Ocean Eyes’ in early 2016. More single releases followed but few made any significant inroads, although ‘Lovely’, a collaboration with Khalid, made it to number five in Australia and number four in New Zealand. Her first major worldwide hit, ‘Bury A Friend’, was released in January 2019, and since then the world has gone bonkers over the young singer. ‘Bad Guy’ was an even bigger hit than ‘Bury A Friend’, and her debut album, ‘When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?’, reached number one in 20 countries.

An artist breaking through like this is not unusual. What makes Eilish exceptional is that her music sounds so different to everything else; it’s bass-heavy, with very little high-end and relatively little in the mid-range, virtually no reverb, lots of weird and wonderful incidental sounds (e.g. a match lighting, a door squeaking), and she sings so softly that she almost whispers. Most of all, there’s the striking production of her songs, courtesy of her older brother and co-writer Finneas O’Connell. The spaces that O’Connell regularly leaves in the production are so daring as to be almost mind-blowing – there are often gaps of two or three seconds with nothing at all. The young duo does not work entirely in isolation, however; they’re aided by mixing engineer Rob Kinelski and mastering engineer John Greenham. Although everything comes across as very understated