For a star of Billie Eilish’s stature, it’s not uncommon to wait years between projects to put out new music. But for an artist of Billie Eilish’s nature, that simply won’t do. “These songs are really current for me, and they're songs that I want to have said right now,” she tells Apple Music's Zane Lowe of the surprise two-track release called, accurately, Guitar Songs—her first new music since 2021's Happier Than Ever. “I was talking to FINNEAS and I was like, 'You know what, man? I don't want to wait until the next album cycle to put these songs on an album and then it's like, 'Wow, we have these two guitar songs that are two years old.'”
Both tracks feature Eilish’s hushed voice accompanied by her brother on acoustic guitar—a deliberate throwback to the first music they made together at home. “I consciously was like, ‘I want to go back to the way it was at the beginning,’” she says. “We were just making music, writing songs on FINNEAS's guitar in our parents' house, and then playing them for people. We didn't have anything recorded, and so all the meetings that we did, we would just bring a guitar, and FINNEAS and I would sing them acoustically. We did that for two years, and that's how we met everyone.”
She definitely prefers this kind of home-recording style to slick professional studios. “I don't like that there's a runner and he asks you what kind of food you want at so-and-so and if you want a LaCroix,” she says. “I really have never liked the vibe of studios. There's no windows. It smells like weed. There's other artists there. You bump into them, you look stupid, and then you're embarrassed that they saw you when you looked stupid. It freaks me out.”
Eilish and FINNEAS made a point to carve out time while touring behind Happier Than Ever, setting schedules when possible to try out these simpler ideas. The first to be written was “The 30th.” “It's called ‘The 30th’ because something happened on November 30 and it had just been the most indescribable thing to have to witness and experience,” Eilish says. “I had been writing down all these thoughts that I was having. I was with FINNEAS, and I was like, ‘I'm sorry, I don't know what you were planning on doing, but we need to write this song about this right now.’”
Eilish has been performing the other track, “TV,” in Europe this summer; you can hear adoring fans joining in on the outro refrain, “Maybe I’m the problem,” in Manchester the first time she and FINNEAS ever played the song live. The decision to add the song to the set was inspired at least in part by watching Harry Styles’ debut “Boyfriends” in his headlining Coachella set weeks before Harry’s House was released. “He's such a big deal, and playing an unreleased song really opens the floodgates of all these questions,” she says. “Will people hate it? Will they love it? Will it be a thing? Will they get bored of it? Will somebody steal it? It's really vulnerable to play a song that is not out that is that vulnerable to you, and that's what I wanted to do. I missed doing that.”
“TV” captures a palpable of-the-moment malaise. In particular, the line “The internet’s gone wild watching movie stars on trial/While they’re overturning Roe v. Wade” feels like summer 2022’s unofficial slogan. Eilish was at Glastonbury when the Supreme Court ruling happened—although she had the lyric written already, knowing what was coming. That immediacy and urgency is what motivated Eilish to get these two songs out, industry norms be damned. “The whole thing with music, and especially when you get bigger, is every drop is this big deal,” she says. “You got to send it in five months before you want it to come out, because you have to get finals ready, and you have to set a date, and you have to shoot the video, and you have to do the press for it, and you have to do a shoot for it, and you have to do promo for it, and you have to get the artwork, and you have to do this and that and this and that. Which is all fine, but it's been so long since I've had music that we make and then it's out.”