WHEN WE ALL FALL ASLEEP, WHERE DO WE GO? by Billie Eilish
When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? (stylized in all caps) is the debut studio album by American singer Billie Eilish and was released on March 29, 2019. The songs "You Should See Me in a Crown" and "When the Party's Over" were released as the first two singles from the album. The third single, "Bury a Friend", was released with the album pre-order on January 30, 2019. The fourth single, "Wish You Were Gay", was released on March 4, 2019 and the fifth single, "Bad Guy", was released on March 29, 2019, shortly after the album's release. The latter later became Eilish's first top ten single on the Billboard Hot 100 when it debuted at number seven. By March 21, 2019, the album had been pre-added 800,000 times on Apple Music, the most of any album to date. Following its release, the album debuted at the top of the charts of Australia, Austria, Flanders, Canada, Ireland, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Scotland, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States. Background On March 20, 2018, Eilish confirmed that she was working on an album and that it would be released towards the end of the year. In July 2018, during an interview with BBC Radio 1, she announced that the album is expected to be out on March 29, 2019. On January 14, 2019, it was reported that Eilish was in the process of mastering the album. On January 29, she formally announced the album's title and revealed its cover art on her Instagram. She simultaneously teased a new single, "Bury a Friend", which was released the following day along with album pre-order. Promotion To promote the album, Eilish will embark on the When We All Fall Asleep, World Tour, scheduled to begin on April 24, 2019. When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? received critical acclaim reviews from music critics. At Metacritic, which assigns a weighted mean rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream publications, the album received a score of 81, based on 18 reviews, indicating "universal acclaim". Commercial performance When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? debuted at number one on the US Billboard 200 with the third-largest streaming numbers for an album by a female artist, with 313,000 album-equivalent units (including 170,000 pure album sales, the second-largest sales week for an album in 2019). In the United Kingdom, it also opened at number one on the UK Albums Chart, selling 48,000 copies, making Eilish the youngest ever solo female act to top the chart.
<b>100 Best Albums</b> Beginning with the haunting alt-pop smash “Ocean Eyes” in 2016, Billie Eilish made it clear she was a new kind of pop star—an overtly awkward introvert who favours chilling melodies, moody beats, creepy videos and a teasing crudeness à la Tyler, The Creator. Now 17, the Los Angeles native—who was homeschooled along with her brother and co-writer, Finneas O’Connell—presents her much-anticipated debut album, a melancholy investigation of all the dark and mysterious spaces that linger in the back of our minds. Sinister dance beats unfold into chattering dialogue from <i>The Office</i> on “my strange addiction”, and whispering vocals are laid over deliberately blown-out bass on “xanny”. “There are a lot of firsts,” says FINNEAS. “Not firsts like ‘Here’s the first song we made with this kind of beat’, but firsts like Billie saying, ‘I feel in love for the first time.’ You have a million chances to make an album you're proud of, but to write the song about falling in love for the first time? You only get one shot at that.”<br /> Billie, who is both beleaguered and fascinated by night terrors and sleep paralysis, has a complicated relationship with her subconscious. “I’m the monster under the bed, I’m my own worst enemy,” she told Beats 1 host Zane Lowe during an interview in Paris. “It’s not that the whole album is a bad dream, it’s just… surreal.” With an endearingly off-kilter mix of teen angst and experimentalism, Billie Eilish is really the perfect star for 2019—and here is where her and FINNEAS' heads are at as they prepare for the next phase of her plan for pop domination. “This is my child,” she says, “and you get to hold it while it throws up on you.”<br /> <b>Figuring out her dreams:</b> <b>Billie:</b> “Every song on the album is something that happens when you’re asleep—sleep paralysis, night terrors, nightmares, lucid dreams. All things that don't have an explanation. Absolutely nobody knows. I've always had really bad night terrors and sleep paralysis, and all my dreams are lucid, so I can control them—I know that I'm dreaming when I'm dreaming. Sometimes the thing from my dream happens the next day and it's so weird. The album isn’t me saying, 'I dreamed that'—it’s the feeling.”<br /> <b>Getting out of her own head:</b> <b>Billie:</b> “There's a lot of lying on purpose. And it's not like how rappers lie in their music because they think it sounds dope. It's more like making a character out of yourself. I wrote the song '8' from the perspective of somebody who I hurt. When people hear that song, they're like, 'Oh, poor baby Billie, she's so hurt.' But really I was just a dickhead for a minute and the only way I could deal with it was to stop and put myself in that person's place.”<br /> <b>Being a teen nihilist role model:</b> <b>Billie:</b> “I love meeting these kids, they just don't give a fuck. And they say they don't give a fuck <i>because of me</i>, which is a feeling I can't even describe. But it's not like they don't give a fuck about people or love or taking care of yourself. It's that you don't have to fit into anything, because we all die, eventually. No one's going to remember you one day—it could be hundreds of years or it could be one year, it doesn't matter—but anything you do, and anything anyone does to you, won't matter one day. So it's like, why the fuck try to be something you're not?”<br /> <b>Embracing sadness:</b> <b>Billie:</b> “Depression has sort of controlled everything in my life. My whole life I’ve always been a melancholy person. That’s my default.”<br /> <b> FINNEAS:</b> “There are moments of profound joy, and Billie and I share a lot of them, but when our motor’s off, it’s like we’re rolling downhill. But I’m so proud that we haven’t shied away from songs about self-loathing, insecurity and frustration. Because we feel that way, for sure. When you’ve supplied empathy for people, I think you’ve achieved something in music.”<br /> <b>Staying present:</b> <b>Billie:</b> “I have to just sit back and actually look at what's going on. Our show in Stockholm was one of the most peak life experiences we've had. I stood onstage and just looked at the crowd—they were just screaming and they didn’t stop—and told them, 'I used to sit in my living room and cry because I wanted to do this.' I never thought in a thousand years this shit would happen. We’ve really been choking up at every show.”<br /> <b> FINNEAS:</b> “Every show feels like the final show. They feel like a farewell tour. And in a weird way it kind of is, because, although it's the birth of the album, it’s the end of the episode.”
