Billie Eilish Sings ‘O Holy Night’ in Captivating Tour Finale: Review

This should be about the time we all start taking Billie Eilish for granted, by the usual standards of fickleness and habituation. So let’s all give ourselves a pat on the back for not becoming so accustomed to her face that we lose sight of what a special gift she is to the pop landscape. More than five years into her superstar era, Eilish has not only avoided the sophomore jinx but bypassed the junior curse, too, with her 2024 album “Hit Me Hard and Soft” not just landing as a critical favorite but remaining ensconced in the top 10 after seven months. We’ve long since moved past the shock of how good she is, but we haven’t gotten blasé about the joy of watching that early precocity turn into an actual plateau.

At the Kia Forum Saturday night, in the last show of a sold-out five-night engagement there, Eilish was doing a hometown victory lap to close out another landmark year. That isn’t being said entirely figuratively. The stage was set up in an elongated in-the-round format that took up a majority of the arena floor, with her band members and some pyrotechnics set up in two recessed areas of the stage, allowing the star not just to run in circles around the edge but to do some figure eights, too. Some of this athleticism surely was based in the nightly demands of performance as well as sheer exuberance; Eilish did admit that she was “exhausted” after the five nights in L.A. capped a three-month North American tour. (She picks it back up again in February with a six-month run overseas.) But in what inevitably felt a little like a friends-and-family performance, she seemed happy enough to play out the pure cardio elements of someone who was born to run, or to literally sprint.

Calisthenics were never remotely the point of the show, though, even if her trademark jumping-in-place might be the major visual that most young fans take away from the night. Eilish has really become our premiere ballad singer over the last half-decade, for however many quirky bangers she also has in her arsenal. Although it wasn’t quite a show-closer, “What Was I Made For?” — the greatest Oscar best song winner of the century so far — nearly felt like a climax to to the set, with Eilish settling down on the southern lip of the stage, legs curled up or dangling as she sat in her sportswear and sang about a doll’s life to one end of the arena that got an extra-special emo boost.

But the most special ballad of the final night at the Forum came during the run’s secret song segment… which, in the case of this mini-residency, amounted to a different Christmas song that Eilish performed each of the five gigs. On previous nights, she had sung “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” “Silent Night,” “Silver Bells” and “I’ll Be Home for Christmas.” Saturday night, a few songs from the end of the show, it was “O Holy Night,” which often is the sacred tune most likely to get picked up by secular singers who find its simple majesty irresistible. Eilish confirmed as much, following her rendition by cheerfully explaining, “I’m not really religious. I just love Christmas so much. I also grew up in a choir, so that’s just my schtick.” Schtick or not, you could have mistaken her for being holier than ever for the length of her tender, elegant treatment.

Watching Eilish turn into one of pop’s best vocalists as her teens gave way to her early 20s (she turned 23 on Wednesday) has been a treat, and it’s not for no reason that she was able to release a “vocals only” edition of “Hit Me Hard and Soft” on digital platforms and as Record Store Day vinyl. We, along with the rest of the world, have gotten over the “whispery” thing; yes, there is that, although she’s also developed a nice belt. For all of the balance promised in the latest album’s title, and delivered, “Hit Me Hard and Soft” really does hit soft a little more than hard, which is to everyone’s benefit. The greatest song on the album (I swear we came to this conclusion without the power of suggestion) is “The Greatest,” a bitter-leaning breakup ballad that starts languid to leave plenty of room to go loud, for a final vocal soar that sounds triumphant, even if the lyrics know better.

On the other hand, when the album and/or her setlist veer toward throbbier or clubbier material — like the show’s opening “Chihiro” — it’s hard not to immediately wish for a lot more of that. The second half of “L’amour De Ma Vie” turned into something like a Charli XCX song, which is why it’s so exhilarating and also why she’s better off employing that as a flavor rather than her main mode — it’s veering into a more crowded lane, however delightfully. Speaking of Charli XCX, Eilish does include the song she guested on on the deluxe “Brat,” “Guess,” as part of her own show, putting up a brief video of Charli before she takes it over. On an earlier, mid-week night at the Forum, Charli showed up in person for a proper duet of the collaborative track, but Saturday’s show didn’t suffer for the lack of guest starpower: Eilish has enough brattiness for a whole Forum on her own.

The Forum finale wasn’t altogether without guests, actually — Finneas counted as one, no longer being a member of her touring band, but showing up through the entirety of the five-night hometown run to renew a duo format with his sister for a few numbers. On Saturday, he also opened the show with his own set, for just one night, offering a preview of what he’ll be doing when he goes out as a headliner on the theater circuit beginning next month. (Locally, he’s doing the Hollywood Palladium on March 5, already sold out.)

Finneas did almost as much pacing on stage during his opening set as Billie did running during the subsequent performance — and in formal wear, as opposed to his sister’s action-ready soccer jersey, Dodgers cap and basketball shorts. There were other contrasts to be drawn, despite Finneas being the producer and co-architect of his sister’s records as well as his own. Finneas is working with a much more traditional full-band ethos on his new solo album, “For Cryin’ Out Loud!,” and that was reflected in a live set that leaned toward analog ’70s and ’80s analog pop influences, minus all the programming that usually goes into his sister’s music. (This probably was the power of suggestion, but you could look up at the Forum wall, see the banner commemorating Harry Styles’ multi-night stand there, and think that Finneas’ current music occupies a little bit of that same space, sans the outsize superstar charm offensive.)

With Eilish’s music, Finneas has been operating in more of a hybrid mode, with a mixture of one-man-band arrangements and outside players, and that shift is evident in her current stage setup. “Real” players and a pair of backup singers were placed in her two recessive stage areas (placed what looked dangerously close to the fireball machines that share the pits, but maybe they’re all wearing flame-retardant stage gear). This represents a surge in manpower from the previous tours, when it was just Finneas and drummer Andrew Marshall backing her on stage. They still don’t deviate greatly from Eilish’s recorded versions, but it’s nice to see the siblings opening up their instrumental palettes… and it is never unwelcome, in modern pop, to hear the reassuring sound of fingers brushing against well-mic’ed nylon strings.

That sound came into play again when Eilish herself picked up an acoustic guitar and sang “Your Power” on a stool, joined by her new backup singers — a song from her previous album that manages to sound lilting and lulling, while delivering a lacerating, patriarchy-poking message. Eilish didn’t say anything about the intent of that song, or offer any other “storyteller”-style exposition about her material, for that matter. As she steps into her future eras, the singer could probably benefit from doing a bit more talking on stage. But it’s hard to find fault with a show that, as is, packs so many hits and album tracks into a compact hour-and-45-minute set and still leaves room for a feeling of breathing room and intimacy.

Right now, she’s navigating an interesting intersection in her still nascent career, somewhere between multiply Oscar-winning, red carpet-commanding pop goddess and just one of the guys. You could see it in her stage gear — colorful sneakers and shorts combined with a more glamorous makeup look, as if Brigitte Bardot or some other screen siren might be down to just shoot some hoops. Billie and Finneas have a preternatural sophistication to what they’re doing, as they have since the beginning… and yet Eilish, at least, clearly still wants to still be a kid about it, in performative ways that feel true to where she’s at. It’s a nice sweet spot.

And Eilish has what almost anybody else is envying on their third album — a biggest-hit-to-date, in the form of “Birds of a Feather,” that supplants anything that has come before as a show-closer now and for probably many years to come. Before this album, she never had a really perfect finale number, since some of her best songs felt either too ephemeral for that spot (“Bad Guy”) or suitably climactic but depressive and grim (“Bury a Friend,” which did end her early tours). “Birds” is an outlier in her catalog as a legitimately happy tune, but with enough darkness and weirdness just around the edges to make it Eilish-esque. She and Finneas found the perfect way to send audiences home happy — not “happier than ever,” but honestly cheerful — without selling out. Yeah, winning a second Oscar was a pretty big deal in 2024, but with career longevity in mind, pulling off the “Birds” hat trick might’ve been even a little bit bigger.

Billie Eilish setlist, Kia Forum, Dec. 21, 2024:

Chihiro
Lunch
NDA
Therefore I Am
Wildflower
When the Party’s Over
The Diner
Ilomilo
Bad Guy
The Greatest
Your Power
Skinny
TV
Bury a Friend
Oxytocin
Guess (Charli XCX song)
Everything I Wanted
Lovely/Idontwannabeyouanymore/Bored/Ocean Eyes
O Holy Night
L’amour De Ma Vie
What Was I Made For?
Happier Than Ever
Birds of a Feather