"No Time To Die” - Billie Eilish’s Bond 25 Theme (Page 7 of 11)

It sounds rather like Diamonds are Forever and a Blondie song ("your hair is beautiful, to - nighttttt") got together and made a slow, sad baby.

Just listened to it for the first time and I like it. I think it’s much better than the Skyfall and Spectre efforts 

I personally loved Sam Mendes' take. Billie Eilish's is soooo underwhelming. It is actually the first Eilish song i have ever heard (LOL) and im asking what is the big deal? (i didnt see the grammys either).

Anyways, its only going to work because its a Bond song, otherwise it would get lost. Adele's Skyfall may be the last classic Bond song we hear in a long time....

Agreed but thats really faint praise. I like her and hoped for better.

Like it or loathe it, it’s a great bit of marketing to raise awareness of the film, especially amongst the younger audience. 4 million + views in 9 hours, it’s been on breakfast shows and the news during day /evening. Whoever signed her up knows how to play the game 

She has a music video that my daughter watches and in it her nose is bleeding and it shocks me whenever I watch it.

Billie Eilish is arguably the new Britney Spears! She's only 18 and she'll be the biggest diva of the 2020's!   

Billie rose to popularity as a teenager, just like Britney back in the late 1990's and 2000's.

12 million views on YouTube in 24 hours. Top song on Apple Music. Currently the 3rd most streamed song on Spotify. News coverage everywhere.

Don’t tell me EON isn’t delighted.

I think it's a great Bond theme. As with every theme song, only history can say how it will be remembered, but I have a feeling it will be looked upon fondly for many years. It hit all the right notes for me, and ties in thematically with Skyfall and Spectre's songs.

EON knows exactly what they're doing with this one. Within hours, tens of millions of listens, reaction videos, reactions of reactions, covers (this one is my favorite: https://youtu.be/-WBxnCRecgA). It's spreading faster than coronavirus. They'll definitely get a box office boost from this one.

Billie Eilish's 'No Time To Die' complements the last two Bond songs, and will likely reinforce some sense of thematic unity between the new movie and the Sam Mendes Bonds. Though I'm no fan of breathy 'mumble vocals' I'd rate the song as a rather engaging if minimalist B-side 'answering note' to Adele's 'Skyfall', lacking 'Skyfall''s complexity and clever negotiation with orchestral vintage Bond music (it would have taken an additional writer to help 'No Time To Die' get to that) but marginally trumping Sam Smith's entry (from which it also derives). I tend to be partial to Bond songs which convey a wounded or heartbroken female perspective, whether blatant - as here - or implicit/'in denial' (I'd count 'Diamonds Are Forever' as coming from that place, and probably also 'Tomorrow Never Dies': both superior songs). It remains to be seen whether the POV in the lyrics of 'No Time To Die' is gender-fluid in its alignment, relating to the swan-song Bond or the villain rather than, or as much, to Madeleine Swann or another female character.

It's certainly a contemporary piece, but more like background music than the main event. Dare I say it, it would exactly fit as a background track to an emotional 'recoupling' sequence in 'Love Island', the reality TV show which manufactures romantic bonding and betrayal between glamorous, vacuous wannabes in their 20s, mixed and matched against cheeky samplings of music like this. Maybe the Eilish song is reaching out to the same demographic as 'Love Island' viewers, but with a nu-emo vibe as well, and a built-in awareness of the broader interest it commands as a Bond/Craig-Bond song.

I'll happily be able to include this one somewhere in my personal, John Barry-dominated, mixed-up playlist of Bond music, as maudlin relief to other, 'bigger' Bond sounds. In that way, it'll work like Katie Melua's strikingly melancholic, acoustic guitar performance of 'Diamonds Are Forever', or even like Natacha Atlas's wistfully enigmatic 'You Only Live Twice' as arranged by David Arnold.

Here is my personal ranking of Craig-era Bond songs (subject to revision after I've listened a few more times to the Billie Eilish song and seen the new film):

1. 'Skyfall' (deservedly Academy Award-winning; a moving fusion of the contemporary with classic Bond sounds)
2. 'Another Way To Die' (the track about which I've had the biggest, favourable change of mind: it's experimental but Bondian; muscular but skittish, as was 'The Man With The Golden Gun' in its day)
3. 'You Know My Name' (well structured grunge rock which rips into the raw energy of a tortured masculinity for the new Bond era)
4. 'No Time To Die' (the downbeat, feet-gazing tone has some appeal, but it's rather 'B side' in scope, which is why I can't rank it higher in this list, as I'd wish to do.)
5. 'Writing's On The Wall' (I still don't like this. Bond and self-pitying falsetto don't go.)

Last edited by Shady Tree (15th Feb 2020 17:24)

Shady’s list (and thoughts about NTTD) mirrors my own. I’ve always loved Another Way to Die.

'You Know My Name' is well structured and full of punch but I personally prefer 'Another Way To Die' because it's an intelligent deconstruction of conventional Bond music (which includes 'You Know My Name', in some ways); 'Another Way To Die' perhaps deliberately reflects the disturbance and disorientation experienced by Craig's hyper-masculine Bond in the wake of Vesper's death. So 'Another Way To Die' has an active dialogue with what's gone before (plus Alicia Keys's voice is sublime, and she sounds fine in duet with Jack White). 'No Time To Die', on the other hand, echoes 'Skyfall' and 'Writing's On The Wall' but without bringing anything much new except the most muted tone of any Bond song.

Arnold unpacked from 'You Know My Name' many elements for the incidental score of CR, and indeed he used it too for cues in QOS. In that sense, 'You Know My Name' fed the last whole Bond score (or scores) which were properly coherent in the traditional, 'John Barry' style.

On the other hand, Arnold hadn't been able to do much with Madonna's techno track for his cues in DAD, nor was he able to make much use of 'Another Way To Die' in QOS: this is because neither of these tracks was a conventional theme song.

Thomas Newman, for his cues, largely bypassed the Adele and Sam Smith songs, although, if he'd been minded to do so, I'm sure he could have made more of the 'Skyfall' theme.

I doubt Zimmer will have been able to do much based on the Eilish number, as it's so minimal; I'm intrigued as to what his musical strategy will be...

Last edited by Shady Tree (17th Feb 2020 08:05)