Billie Eilish

Last time the star played Sydney, the venue was a quarter the size. Now she owns a devotional 20000-strong crowd in a night of freedom and deliverance.

[TV](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_JGGLJMpVks), released in a surprise drop last month – ends with a collective mantra acknowledging our complicity in the sorry state of the world and, strangely, relinquishing our guilt. Soon, she breaks too, laughing through the track; in the crush, a sign is barely visible: “I GHOSTED MY THERAPIST TO SEE YOU.” One of her newest singles – the homespun polemic [ Happier Than Ever](https://www.theguardian.com/music/2021/jul/31/billie-eilish-happier-than-ever-review), which sees her graduating from the claustrophobic horrors of her debut record [When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?](https://www.theguardian.com/music/2019/mar/29/billie-eilish-when-we-all-fall-asleep-where-do-we-go-review) into a more expansive symphony of genres. But these are merely spectacle in a show centred on a newer, gentler Eilish: one who tells her concertgoers to hug their neighbours no less than twice, who commands us to take deep breaths with her while we “think about what we’re grateful for”. “I think I’m ageing well,” she sings on Getting Older, as a dizzying array of childhood photos zooms through the background. At just 20, she has already spent years speaking widely about the internet’s invasive, damaging fascination with her [body](https://www.theguardian.com/music/2021/jul/31/billie-eilish-to-always-try-to-look-good-is-such-a-loss-of-joy-and-freedom), her [clothing](https://www.dazeddigital.com/music/article/53571/1/billie-eilish-admits-attempts-control-her-image-baggy-clothes-didnt-really-work) – either too much or not enough – and her [sexuality](https://www.them.us/story/billie-eilish-keeping-sexuality-to-herself). “Stop!” the crowd roars in one of its most memorable lines. An orchestral choir at the start of album cut Goldwing sounds more heavenly than ever, voices floating skyward towards the arena’s cavernous ceilings. Her moves are reminiscent of Lorde’s “Sign my cast,” reads one of them. At Sydney’s Qudos Bank Arena, the first leg of her Australian tour, she reclaims the agency she may have once ceded to lecherous commentators and puffed-up macho men with little to offer.