Billie Eilish contemplates death and finds consolation on this song from her ironically titled second album Happier Then Ever.

There’s something almost unbearably poignant about a teenage girl singing about death. That’s not what teenage girls are supposed to be thinking about, let alone writing and singing about.

Then again, Billie Eilish wrote and recorded Everybody Dies during lockdown when we were all worried the pandemic might claim the lives of our nearest and dearest (and of course in many cases it did).

Billie tries to comfort her listeners  – themselves mostly teenage girls, especially at this point in her career  – by reassuring them that death happens to everyone in the end and the important thing when it comes is to have been loved.

There’s something so intimate about her voice, as if she’s confiding secrets, and it’s enhanced here by the swirling atmospheric production of Texas producer Alpha 5 Music.

The lyric encompasses Eilish’s feelings about honesty, immortality, lockdown, the future, and hints at heartbreak. Yet somehow it’s as uplifting as it is melancholic.