Billie Eilish

She was born in Los Angeles in December 2001, into a family of working actors and musicians, and home-schooled alongside her older brother Finneas. That detail matters more than it sounds. The two of them did not come up through a label development deal or a talent show. They wrote and recorded together in their parents’ house in Highland Park, in Finneas’s bedroom, and that bedroom is where the sound that made her famous was actually built.

The voice is the first thing people notice: close, quiet, often barely above a whisper, recorded so near to the microphone that it feels like she is in the room with you. It is the opposite of belting, and it turned out to be the perfect instrument for songs about dread, intimacy, and the things people keep to themselves.

Her debut album arrived in 2019 and rewrote what was possible for a teenager in pop. At the 2020 Grammys she swept all four of the General Field awards in one night and became the youngest artist ever to win Album of the Year. She makes pop, but a strange and shadowed version of it, alt-pop and electropop that pulls horror, humor, and confession into the same small space. None of it sounds like anyone else.