Lorde sent Billie Eilish a direct message on Twitter when Billie was thirteen years old. Eilish later told The Edge NZ that she always credits Lorde for that — "I always prop her for doing that for me." It's a small biographical fact that sits at the center of something much larger: the most significant passing of the torch in contemporary pop, a lineage that ran from a suburban New Zealand teenager to a Los Angeles bedroom and then, a decade later, looped back on itself in the most satisfying way possible when both artists ended up inside the same album cycle.
Lorde arrived in 2013 as something genuinely disruptive. Pure Heroine, recorded with producer Joel Little at Golden Age Studios in Auckland, was a minimalist gut-punch built on sparse hip-hop-inflected beats and a mezzo-soprano vocal that barely rose above a murmur. Little co-wrote, produced, mixed, engineered, and played every instrument on the record, with Lorde contributing additional production on several tracks. "Royals" and "Tennis Court" rewired what a teenage pop star was allowed to sound like. Before Pure Heroine, young women in pop followed a fairly fixed script: children's TV to Disney Channel to VMAs controversy. Lorde simply appeared and sang, and the specificity of her suburban New Zealand boredom turned out to be universal. The album went six-times platinum in the US, and "Royals" won Song of the Year at the 56th Grammy Awards alongside Little. More consequentially, it opened a door that had previously been locked: the door to being a young woman in pop who made the inside of her own head the subject.
Billie Eilish walked through that door. "Ocean Eyes," written and produced by her brother Finneas O'Connell and uploaded to a streaming platform in November 2015 when Eilish was thirteen, carried the whispered intimacy, the gothic interiority, the refusal to belt that Lorde had established as viable pop grammar. One critic noted that Lorde's "trademark conversational singing — at times dropping as low as a whisper — is the lingua franca of pop today," and that artists like Billie Eilish owed a significant debt to her success. Eilish's signing to Darkroom and Interscope in August 2016 confirmed that the industry had absorbed the lesson: this aesthetic was commercially viable. Where Lorde worked with a single outside collaborator in Joel Little, and later Jack Antonoff for Melodrama, Eilish's creative unit was even more hermetically sealed. Hit Me Hard and Soft, released May 17, 2024, was written entirely by Billie and Finneas, with Finneas producing every track and playing keyboards, synthesizer, glockenspiel, drums, guitar, bass, and programming across the record. The album debuted at number two on the Billboard 200 with 339,000 album-equivalent units, charted all ten of its songs in the top 40 of the Hot 100, and "Birds of a Feather" peaked at number two on the Hot 100.
The interesting thing about the Lorde-to-Eilish lineage is that it goes well beyond sound. Both artists made the same structural decision at the same career moment: they refused to expand their audience at all costs. Lorde retreated from the spotlight after Pure Heroine and returned four years later with Melodrama, a record she made with Jack Antonoff that was a maximalist leap from Pure Heroine's minimalism, dense with piano and synthesizer, but the emotional posture was unchanged: still an artist making music from the inside out, not toward a demographic. Eilish made the same bet on Happier Than Ever in 2021, and again on Hit Me Hard and Soft in 2024, which arrived with no pre-release singles and a tracklist that moved through "Lunch," "Chihiro," and "Wildflower" as a continuous listening experience rather than a singles delivery system.
What makes 2024 so satisfying as a chapter in this story is that the influence finally ran in both directions at once. Charli XCX's Brat, released June 7, 2024, included a remix of "Girl, so confusing" featuring Lorde, released June 21, 2024. It was Lorde's first high-profile pop collaboration in years, and a song that directly addressed the online discourse around their perceived rivalry. That same summer, Charli recruited Eilish for a remix of "Guess," originally a track from the Brat deluxe edition. The remix debuted atop the UK Singles Chart and reached number twelve on the Hot 100. Two artists who had both built careers on Lorde's blueprint of interiority and refusal ended up orbiting the same cultural moment, and Lorde was there too, inside the same album cycle.
The DM Lorde sent to a thirteen-year-old Billie Eilish was a recognition of kinship: here is someone who understands what it costs to be a teenager under that kind of scrutiny, who knows the particular loneliness of being the "weird girl" that the mainstream has decided to consume. What neither of them could have known then was that the aesthetic Lorde cracked open with Pure Heroine and deepened with Melodrama would become so thoroughly the dominant mode of serious pop that by 2024, the most critically acclaimed albums of the year — Brat, Hit Me Hard and Soft — all existed in the space she had cleared. Lorde described the room they would all eventually move into.
