Billie Eilish sounds lighter and more positive in the Ziggo Dome

Whoops! There, singer Billie Eilish is launched in strobe light like a jack-of-all-trades. Her black hair in two stubborn pigtails, an oversized shirt, the shins under her cycling shorts taped preventively for a lot of jumping work and radiant eyes that indicate that it is all right in her head. So don’t worry, even if the cry is “I wanna end me” in the opening track ‘bury a friend’ maybe on the wrong track. Eilish’s documentary (2021) made it clear that the fact that she sings it “makes me not do it”.

Every song is received with a deafening scream

American Billie Eilish Pirate Baird O’Connell has been a pop phenomenon since she was seventeen. As a seriously despairing teenager with colored hair, she and her slightly older brother Finneas devised equally dark, contrarian and uplifting electro-pop, in which her darkest thoughts, madness and night terrors were given a natural role. Many Prices, multiplatinum success and a long corona break since 2019 (she was also at Lowlands then) later, rest and time seem to have done her good. In the Ziggo Dome, the now 20-year-old Eilish seems to be freed from her toughest demons.

From the spectacular opening, she emphatically seeks connection with the devout, sometimes very young audience. In the three-man alliance with Finneas (fanning electronic sounds, guitar, backing vocals) and drummer Andrew Marshall (pops or a minimal dull thump), Eilish is the only one everywhere – on the entire stage, on the slope in the middle surrounded by projections and on the long catwalk between audience. There, as a happy cartoonish figure, she not only jumps around, but she shrugs and crawls into her cynically hypothermic ‘Therefore I Am’, she kneels in red lasers (‘My strange addiction’), falls into a split (‘Lost Cause’), pirouettes her chunky sneakers and sinks backwards into a back bridge.

Her show is remarkably more solid than before: spring hits, compelling ballads, a calm acoustic guitar part with Finneas – the strong ‘Your Power’ – audience rapture from a crane that brings her closer to the top ring and then a pumping end part. The visuals are also up; from a creepy meter high spider (‘You should see me in a crown’), to a highway and the gothic black tears in ‘When the party is over’ that started her success. Of some songs only a chorus is heard (‘Lovely’), as a joint kit that brings together about 25 songs.

layered

The slow and subcutaneous of her older songs is lighter and more positive live. That’s also because of the album Happier Than Ever from last year: cleaner and musically layered. Take the resigned ‘Getting Older’, she frames that song with images from her childhood. “Ahhh,” the audience says. Anyway, because every song is received with deafening screams and cheers. That drowns out Eilish’s vocals, which is a shame. But she is clearly used to it and continues to sing with that special, light husky voice.

It is striking and almost touching how Eilish keeps a sharp eye on the well-being of her audience throughout the concert. That jumps high at her command, but she keeps seeing the fainters, handing out water (“I see you, don’t worry”) and doing very zen breathing exercises with her audience, blowing negative thoughts with them. Eilish as a therapeutic pop star who shares her experience: completely up-to-date.