Pop star Billie Eilish: ‘My parents never said, 'I’m proud of you' – never, not once’

Seventeen-year-old pop star Billie Eilish has spoken about the links between her depression, her recent fame and her upbringing during an interview on Zane Lowe’s Beats 1 show.

Speaking alongside her older brother Finneas O'Connell, best known for his role in Glee and his musical collaboration with his sister, Eilish explained that the siblings grew up “never being told that anyone was proud of us”.

Known as the queen of misery music, Eilish is the youngest ever female solo act to go in at Number 1 in the UK Album Charts with When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?

A streaming sensation, she first found fame through SoundCloud in 2016, and now boasts more than 31 million monthly listens on Spotify.

Speaking to Lowe, Eilish admitted: “Our parents never said, ‘I’m proud of you.’” She said that she took this personally at the time, but reasoned that “I’m understanding more and more as I get older [that] our parents didn’t want us to feel like them being proud of us was the only way that we could accomplish things.”

Eilish has faced criticism that her music fuels a culture of mental health one-upmanship, with teenagers competing over who’s the most depressed.

Responding to these accusations, Eilish countered that her music is “just about listening. I feel like some people just try to act like they know, but just listen. It’s not about trying to up their depression. It’s not about who’s sadder, who’s gone through worse.

“It’s about listening to people and actually just caring about them.”