In a way, there is not that much to say about the new Billie Eilish single, "Lunch", and I don't mean that as an insult. For the last half decade, Billie and older brother Finneas have traded in high quality minimalism - taking the mantle from Lorde's Royals. "Lunch" is not a development from the style that made Eilish's name in the first place. I could count on one hand the number of instrumental elements on display. The main vocal melody is repetitive, milked for all it's worth. Even the video is as simple as it gets, with Billie in oversized basketball gear in front of a white background. It seems the siblings have challenged themselves to make as simple a track as possible while still making a great track. I think they pulled it off.
Music
It's a fun game to work out which parts of "Lunch" are samples and which are live instruments. The bass goes under so many transformations that it is hard to tell. The first bass sound we hear is thick and heavily distorted, but as the song moves on, it becomes cleaner, something that would be acceptable in a rock band. We get some moody guitar chords played high up the neck. It is easy to imagine Finneas playing these chords himself, or maybe it's from an obscure Pink Floyd song. The drums too begin in a muddy, farty distortion, and then explode into a simple beat with emphasis on 2 and 4. A strange mix of the organic and the artificial, like The Strokes done by robots.
Billie's hook calls to my mind a teasing playground chant. It would be irritating if it wasn't so catchy. And why is it catchy when there isn't much of a tune to speak of? That I think is a question of emphasis. Most lines have two stressed syllables:
I could EAT that girl for LUNCH
Yeah, she's DANcing on my TONGUE
The final syllable is further emphasized by the fact that Billie sustains the note for longer than all the preceding notes. This has a kind of slowing down effect:
I could eat that girl for luuuunch...
This is a melody you tap, not one that you hum.
Words
Billie and Finneas have found a way to make sex scary again. I have a mad theory as to how they did it. It's all in the visuals. Billie famously wears baggy clothes, right? And that emphasizes her smallness. It infantilizes her. She looks like a child and it is creepy to hear a child say something like:
I could eat that girl for Lunch
It's a craving, not a crush.
This is an era where we can hear a line like:
Eatin' Asian pussy, all I need was sweet and sour sauce
Tell your boss you need an extra hour off
Get you super wet after we turn the shower off
and not bat an eyelid.
I am not going to pretend that "Lunch" is Shakespeare. "Hunch" is there probably because it rhymes with "Lunch". Yet, it gets me thinking about the nature of intuition, especially when it comes to matters of love. It's comforting to think that we can bullet point our way through life. But you don't sit down and make the decision to fall in love with somebody after a rational weighing of the pros and cons. It begins with a hunch. The heart gets there before the head.
"Lunch" makes use of both perfect and slant rhymes:
I could eat that girl for Lunch
Yeah, she's dancing on my tongue
Tastes like she might be the one
And I could never get enough.
I wonder what rhymes were left on the cutting room floor. Bunch? Crunch? Munch? Munch would have been a good one, surely.
I could eat that girl for Lunch
Every day I like to Munch
Put her in my mouth and crunch
I like it quite a bunch.
Something like that?
In my favourite verse in the track, Eilish employs perfect rhymes only. Images of a surreptitious rendezvous suggest this might be an affair, the kind of lunch you need to gobble down quickly while nobody is looking:
Call me when you're there
Said, "I bought you somethin' rare
And I left it under Claire'"
So now, she's comin' up the stairs
So listen again to “Lunch”. Then check out my breakdowns on Olivia Rodrigo, Eminem, Fontaines DC and Vampire Weekend.