When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go

''When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?'' (stylized in all caps) is the debut studio album by American singer and songwriter Billie Eilish. It was released on March 29, 2019, by Darkroom and Interscope Records in the US and Polydor Records in the UK. Eilish, aged 17 at the time of release, largely wrote the album with her brother Finneas O'Connell, who produced it at his small bedroom studio in Highland Park, Los Angeles.

Musically, ''When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?'' is a pop, electropop, avant-pop, and art pop record, though it also features influences from hip hop and industrial music. Its songs explore themes such as modern youth, drug addiction, heartbreak, suicide, and mental health, with lyrical sensibilities of humor and horror. Eilish said the album was inspired in part by lucid dreaming and night terrors, which are reflected on the cover photo.

The album was marketed with the release of seven singles, four of which received multi-platinum certifications in the US—" You Should See Me in a Crown", " When the Party's Over", "Bury a Friend", and the worldwide hit "Bad Guy". Eilish also embarked on several tours in support of the album, including the When We All Fall Asleep Tour and the Where Do We Go? World Tour. An immediate commercial success, the album topped record charts in many countries during its first week of release. By June 2019, it had sold more than 1.3 million copies in the US and become the year's best-selling album in Canada, while in the UK, it had made Eilish the youngest female solo act to chart at number one.

Upon release, ''When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?'' received universal acclaim and was one of the year's most acclaimed albums. Many reviewers praised its subject matter, songwriting, cohesiveness, and Eilish's vocal styling. At the 2020 Grammy Awards, it won Album of the Year, Best Pop Vocal Album, and Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical, while "Bad Guy" won Record of the Year and Song of the Year; Finneas also won the award for Producer of the Year, Non-Classical. In 2020, the album was ranked at 397 on ''Rolling Stone'''s 500 Greatest Albums of All Time list.

Writing and recording

Billie Eilish and her brother Finneas O'Connell began working on ''When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?'' in May 2016 with the track "Listen Before I Go", but re-recorded the song two years later in spring 2018. Eilish intended the album to contain material "that's so fun to be in the moment at a show to" as well as "shit that's crazy and also depressing." She further wished to "do everything in this album" due to her hatred for genre restrictions.

The album was recorded in O'Connell's small bedroom studio in Highland Park, California using production material including Logic Pro X, a Universal Audio Apollo 8 interface and a pair of Yamaha HS5 studio monitors with an H8S subwoofer. The pair explained that they chose this recording location rather than a professional studio due to the bedroom's intimate and homely nature as well as the manner in which the bedroom affects vocals, while criticizing an external studio's lack of natural light and high cost of use. Despite the independence of the writing process, they were nonetheless subject to deadlines and meetings with Eilish's label, Darkroom/ Interscope; she later stated that she "hated every second" of the album's creation. Audio mixing was handled by Rob Kinelski, who had mixed all of Eilish's work thus far. In an interview with '' Billboard'', Kinelski disclosed that O'Connell would send him "really nice stems" for separate instruments during the process.

On March 20, 2018, Eilish confirmed that she was working on an album and estimated 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 was expected to be out on March 29, 2019. The album was mastered and finished in January 2019.

Music and lyrics

Eilish's vocal style on ''When We All Fall Asleep'' has frequently been described as soft and whispered by music critics. Neil McCormick of ''The Daily Telegraph'' stated that the singer's tone "can shift from coquettish to threatening, playfully ironic to emotionally sincere in a breath", adding that her "close-to-the-mic singing is enhanced by layers of ethereal harmonies without swamping a sense of intimacy." It has further been likened to ASMR; while some reviewers simply stated that her voice reminded them of the sensation, others stated that they experienced "tingles" listening to Eillish's vocals, with Helen Holmes of ''Observer'' citing the singer's "little giggles and intonations, and the way her intonation 'falls off' at the end of sentences" as the reasons.

The album is built around O'Connell's production which frequently incorporates amplified bass, minimalist percussion, and additional foley and acoustic sounds. While the song structures on the record are traditional in construction, made of formal melodies accompanied with keyboard, guitar or bass instrumentation, it further incorporates harsh, industrial influences, prompting Jon Caramanica of ''The New York Times'' to describe Eilish as "the first SoundCloud-rap pop star, without the rapping." Chris Willman of ''Variety'' also noted the album's usage of dissonance and distortion, commenting that, "With all its moments of distortion and attitude, tempered by sheer loveliness, and rude and emotional songs about night terrors and daydreams, ''When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?'' feels like a rock 'n' roll album, even if there's virtually nothing on it that sounds like rock music." Elsewhere, critics have highlighted indie electronic, pop, EDM, dance-pop, synth-pop, R&B, trap and jazz influences. The record has been noted for its minimalist and hip hop-inspired production, leading to comparisons to Lorde's debut album ''Pure Heroine'', which was largely the aim of the siblings, as they found that adding additional musical features often makes a song sound "way worse".

Because Eilish draws on a variety of genres, Yasmin Cowan of '' Clash'' opined that "to confine erto any specific brand of music would be doing her craft a disservice," although other reviewers have characterized ''When We All Fall Asleep'' as a pop, electropop, avant-pop, and art pop album. Robert Christgau describes it as " electro-saturated", and Chris Riemenschneider from the '' Star Tribune'' calls it "jaggedly rhythmic, candidly intimate stream-of-consciousness electro-pop", while ''Rolling Stone'' writer Suzy Exposito finds it "full of dressed-down avant-pop with D.I.Y. immediacy and intimacy" yet still comparable to the maximalist pop of Eilish's contemporaries Ariana Grande and Halsey. According to Amanda Petrusich from ''The New Yorker'', Eilish's "spare, portentous" style of electropop "recalls the work of Trent Reznor, but is imbued with far more friskiness, conviviality, and youthful nonchalance". In Tom Hull's opinion, the album's electropop songs have a quality of catchiness but feature unobtrusive hooks.

Lyrically, the album deals with the hopes and fears of contemporary youth, touching on themes of drug addiction, heartbreak, climate change, mental health and suicide. In an interview with Zane Lowe, Eilish explained that the album was largely inspired by lucid dreaming and night terrors, revealing that it "is basically what happens when you fall asleep," hence its title, and stated at an earlier interview that it "is basically supposed to be a bad dream, or a good dream". '' i-D'' writer Jack Hall noted that in order to deal with the record's serious subject matter in a less portentous manner, Eilish writes with humor and horror in a manner similar to memes. Despite this, it is unclear whether the experiences found in the lyrics are her own, since she often distances herself from the content of her songs. The singer explained to ''Rolling Stone'' that she and her brother "like writing from other people's perspectives," elaborating that half of the songs on the album "are fictional and half are things hewas going through, and no one will ever know which is which." In 2021, Eilish stated that the album was "almost all fictional".

Songs

The album's opening track, "!!!!!!!", is a short intro in which Eilish slurps saliva from her Invisalign aligners and announces that "this is the album", before she and her brother descend into laughter. O'Connell explained that it served to "find a sense of humor" amidst the "heaviness" of the album. The following track, "Bad Guy", is a pop-trap song which uses a bass, a kick-drum and amplified finger snaps in its production. The song's lyrics feature Eilish taunting her partner, while suggesting that she is the "bad guy" rather than him. Eilish was inspired to write " Xanny" after attending a party at which her friends "kept throwing up, kept drinking more," consequently becoming "completely not who they were". While recording the song, Eilish and her brother created a sound inspired by a girl blowing cigarette smoke in the former's face alongside a drum kit and a jazz-inspired loop in order to replicate the feeling of being "in secondhand smoke".

" You Should See Me in a Crown", which the two siblings wrote after watching the third episode of the second season of BBC
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