Billie Eilish Covers A Strokes Song About How Phones Are The Worst
April 4, 2018
Last month, Dua Lipa surprised with an unexpected, slow-motion cover of Arctic Monkeys' "Do I Wanna Know?" that showcased once again how good big, brawny rock songs can sound when approached from another angle. Now, 16-year-old pop whiz kid Billie Eilish has made a similar play, this time with "Call Me Back," a blue cut from The Strokes' 2011 LP, Angles.
Playing as part of The Tonight Show's web-only Cover Room series, Eilish makes the molasses-paced Strokes song, an outlier on an album packed with varying moods and tempos, feel like her own. There's an ache in Eilish's voice that makes the loneliness of singing the lyrics "I hold your phone, don't wake up / I hear a voice in the ground" extremely present.
Eilish's EP Don't Smile At Me was released last summer, and just last week, she put out the new, electronic-tinged single "Bitches Broken Hearts," which sounds like it could sit side-by-side with her Strokes cover on a release, maybe if it was arranged just a little differently. Or maybe you could make your own playlist and sequence it that way.
She also performed her own song "Bellyache" on The Tonight Show a few weeks ago. Check that out below, after you fall all the way into her crystalline acoustic "Call Me Back" cover above.