The Singles Jukebox

We reconvene for Pride month, and Billie Eilish is serving…

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Jackie Powell: I had a conversation with a semi-retired recording artist back in 2018 insinuating that Billie Eilish “had to be queer.” So when Eilish confirmed her queerness by saying “wasn’t it obvious” in her red-carpet interview with Variety this past December, I was reminded of that conversation. It was a bizarre comment to make at the time, when Eilish was only 16. A generalization about Generation Z is that they learn their sexuality and preferences earlier in life, but that’s not everyone’s truth, and certainly not Eilish’s. “Lunch” is the sonic expression of that “aha” moment for the now 22-year-old, and Eilish allows her listener to feel just as sensual, confident and quite honestly horny. There’s such a stigma toward women, and especially toward queer women, who communicate their desires, but Eilish has a swagger on “Lunch” that provides compelling evidence that she’s reached a moment in her life when she just doesn’t give a damn. When she was that brooding teenager who pretended not to give a fuck, how many people saw through that? The crescendos of each chorus and the louder guitar strums alongside the nervous and flirty bassline mirror how she becomes more confident in her vocals and delivery as the track continues. Eilish seems to make everything she touches just that much cooler, and that includes queer expression. Happy Pride!
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Julian Axelrod: In an April interview for Rolling Stone, Billie Eilish described her “no singles” approach to her new record: “This album is like a family: I don’t want one little kid to be in the middle of the room alone.” But when “Lunch” pops up as track 2 on Hit Me Hard and Soft, it stands out like the gay cousin in a family reunion photo. While the songs around it are shrouded in shadows and shifting beats, “Lunch” is brash and direct in every sense, never breaking eye contact as the bass line slowly snakes its way up your thigh. It’s not just that “Lunch” is more sexually explicit than anything else Billie’s released; it’s also the most explicitly pop song she’s produced to date. She’s pulling us in instead of pushing us away, trying to keep her composure while stumbling over every word of her obsessive internal monologue. (If “Lunch” has a tether on the back half of the album, it’s probably the twisted stalker narrative “The Diner.” Don’t tell Billie I said that.) It’s probably the least cool she’s ever sounded on record, but she wears desperation well.
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Will Adams: Lyrically and vocally, Billie’s in her element, with winking deliveries — “left it under… Claire”; the mumbled “I just wanna get her off”; “she’s the headlights, I’m the deer” — that add her signature menace to this ode to queer lust. It’s the production that loses me. The Greg Kurstin-esque sheen brings less to mind a torrid affair than it does safe radio pop where what’s being eaten might literally be cake by the ocean. The warped bass in the outro is nice, but too late.
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Tim de Reuse: The sex-as-food tune is a well-known stumbling block for the established 21st-century star. The ones that succeed enough to gain significant cultural relevance are not remembered as masterpieces, and more often their metaphors are so strained and grotesque that they’re remembered primarily for being mocked. “Lunch” is not immune to these issues because the whole pursuit is, on a base level, extraordinarily goofy, and the song does little to elevate the concept aesthetically. The instrumental, in particular, is just a sleek post-punk-pop serving platter until it hits the outro and turns into a bass throb that gestures in the direction of sexual release but feels far too clean and filed down. Unlike her predecessors, though, Eilish seems to understand that she’s singing about a goofy thing, and so her performance aims for a difficult triple-point between meekness, bravery, and desperate arousal. There’s a little flare of vocal fry as she dips her voice as quiet as she can get it while still holding a tone, delivering lyrics that are indisputably silly with an undertone of “ah, fuck, I can’t believe I’m actually saying this out loud.” It’s an apt synecdoche for the process of convincing yourself to pursue your first-ever same-sex attraction: get so turned on that your self-enforced inhibitions are finally broken and ridiculous things start spilling out of your mouth. Awkward, in a charming, genuine way. But still awkward.
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Katherine St. Asaph: Less vorecore than you’d expect, a little more coy vulnerability, and a lot more louche dirtbaggery, especially in Eilish’s vocal delivery — it’s not just the outfits that make this seem like something that’d play on VH1 between RHCP and Sublime.
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Rachel Saywitz: “Lunch,” lyrically and visually, plays as more than just a coming out for Billie Eilish: it’s delightfully fuckboy-esque, suave and amusing and definitely eye-roll inducing, but in that intentionally flirty way—she laughs at her pick up lines as much as we do but doesn’t hide her lust. I love it for her, but I don’t love how muddied it sounds. You don’t need to get everything wet, Billie!
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Ian Mathers: Kinda feels like the production is falling between stools. The two most successful parts happen in a row: first when you get the relatively subdued, sparsely accompanied vocal (the closest thing to the ol’ wispy minimalism here), and then immediately after when the maximalism gets cranked up and the bass gets to properly growl as Billie only gives us fragments of earlier lines. Why does the middle ground throughout the rest not work quite as well? The guitar and the bass both seem a bit off. Maybe growing pains?
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Jonathan Bradley: A contradiction underlying Billie Eilish’s work has been the way the insularity of her affect — her high and wispy vocal encased in bedroom production steered by brother Finneas — has built pop music that is so outré: hers is big music made in small ways. That’s particularly notable with her ballads, which are robust in their frailty, but it’s true too of her more upbeat singles too. “Lunch” is notable, even more than its palpable rather than revelatory queerness, for being Eilish’s biggest banger since “Bad Guy,” which was also driven by a thick bassline more commanding than its gothy setting might have been expected to tolerate. Add a nearly bumptious drum machine and spy-guitar accents, and “Lunch” turns out to be an update on 2000s dance-punk, albeit with the lights turned low. It’s good for unexpectedly bold flirtations at the discotheque, though perhaps ones made while still avoiding eye contact.
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Dave Moore: Billie Eilish can do ASMR-pop, sure, but for all the whispers and murmurs, she’s never really tried to sell sexy, per se — and I think that kind of works here, where the energy is closer to something like Art Brut’s “Good Weekend.” For me the key lyric is “I could buy her so much stuff,” all of those possibilities short-circuiting linear thought: an overwhelmed nerd giddy with desire awkwardly lugging a random haul of gifts — chocolates, books, clothes, a lamp, decorative stationery — upstairs in eager anticipation.
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Taylor Alatorre: More than any single lyric, it’s the constant subtle switching between postures of dominance and submission that defines this song, fleshing out its scenario in ways that prevent it from being either a trifle or a dreaded “statement record.” The innuendos feel mandatory because in a screenwriting sense they are, quickly setting the scene and freeing Eilish to tinker with her kitchen-sink realist approach to the subject: early-stage romance as defined through surreptitious gift purchases and altered eating habits. These details are partly foreshadowing of the album’s drama-to-come, but in the song they serve as real-time narration of a moment where judgment and caution have been deliberately, defiantly suspended. This being a Finneas production, that lapse in caution is paradoxically expressed through restraint rather than release, painting Eilish as someone who’s both eager to display her coolness to another and fearful of what any loss of that coolness, and hence control, might entail. 
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Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: Too cute; too limp. When she’s writing about herself — or moving away from others — Eilish can summon depths of feeling that defy the increasingly slick productions she and her brother have been cooking up over the past half decade. Here, she’s writing about loving (or at least craving) others (mirrored others in the text, identities disguised under fake names and all, but others nonetheless) and she doesn’t sound nearly as involved. I’m not the kind of fan who wants artists to suffer or anything of the sort, but Eilish doesn’t seem like she’s having any fun either. The Fitz & the Tantrums-type-beat is also a hard sell; the nostalgic turn has not yet caught up to 2014.
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Mark Sinker: I was reading a Bluesky exchange about the way “crickets” has pleasingly come to mean “total silence as awkward response”, and it has me thinking a lot about the LP’s many crisply concrete strategies for expressing extreme ruminative gentleness of intimacy: as witnessed in this song the precisely locked horizon of sound-mirrors, the offhand return of the vworp, the closing lacework of sampled gasps. In Billie’s case, the key word in the phrase “assured expression of vulnerability” is these days much more the first than the last. I caught myself in a spasm of irritation against a Facebook mutual declaring that “Lunch” had to be the single because the rest were (his words) “very dreary” — and I mean, no it isn’t dreary at all, but it isn’t as if the Juggernaut of the Dread Pirate Baird will be even faintly derailed by one solitary dissenter’s jadedness, either. She doesn’t need my help, or ours: from beneath us it devours.
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Alfred Soto: I’ve seen social media grumbles over “Lunch” as an aberration, a concession to skittish record company execs as if even in an era more grudgingly tolerant towards queer culture they’d dig a fat, stentorian song about cunnilingus. It’s catchy. It booms. 
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Nortey Dowuona: Pop constantly cycles between puritanism and co-optation, often at a whim, depending on what the industry feels comfortable choosing at any particular time. “Lunch” ducks that by simply sitting with the reality of being in a relationship; Billie buys “Claire” cool things, drinks in her beauty, and makes love to her without even glancing at anyone who disapproves. If this were released a decade earlier it would have had to be cloaked in metaphor, now, as we’re on the cusp of another tipping of the hand towards fascism, it’s just very straightforward. Why hide anymore? Claire’s just too sweet.
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Isabel Cole: A few months ago, watching Love Lies Bleeding, I had the deliriously happy thought, I love to live in the future where anyone can just go see Kristen Stewart suck on some buff lady’s toe at the Union Square Regal on a normal Tuesday night. I have a similar feeling listening to one of the few inarguable A-listers in pop’s most youthful cohort sing about eating pussy and spoiling the shit out of her girlfriend; it’s rare that what a song means culturally impacts my experience of it, but damn, that feels fucking good! Billie strikes a delightfully endearing balance between wide-eyed, marveling I could buy her so much stuff! with kid-in-a-candy-store glee, and mischievous: there’s a beat in “And I left it under… Claire” where you can almost hear her smirking before, I assume, bursting into laughter at her own antics. It’s a performance that nails the giddy goofiness of wanting someone so bad it makes your brain short-circuit. Finneas’s production brings out the song’s playfulness, giving it a respectable groove whose details appeal to me more with each listen; I’m a sucker for a well-deployed handclap!
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Wayne Weizhen Zhang: “Lunch” is a straightforward hit that will sound great during Pride month, but her third studio effort contains more ambitious and epic work. In the context of the album, it’s more of an appetizer.
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