It’s a measure of what Billie Eilish’s life has been like in 2021 that she woke up one morning last month, rolled over to check her phone and found out she’d got seven Grammy award nominations. She’d overslept the actual announcement. “I was up late, watching Fleabag. Again!” We’re speaking over Zoom from her home in Los Angeles. “This is my third time watching Fleabag. I’ve literally just paused it, again, to do this interview. Andrew Scott is my favourite actor in the world! And Phoebe [Waller-Bridge] is so fucking good, I can’t stress it enough. When I met her at the Bond premiere, I was trying not to blow smoke up her ass the entire night.” Eilish would be a standout figure of 2021 for her Grammy-winning title music for No Time to Die alone, written, as always, with her big brother, Finneas. It premiered at the pre-Covid 2020 Brit awards and was finally unleashed in the cinemas just over two months ago (“We saw the whole movie in December 2019… we’ve had to keep all the secrets for two years… that was hard!”). But the Bond theme is old news, given everything else that has happened this past year. Billie’s second album, Happier Than Ever, released in July, was a huge, global hit, expanding her trademark glitchy-moody pop into new territories of torch song and bossa nova. The British Vogue cover interview that preceded it also exploded the internet, largely because of the Eilish-directed photoshoot – the green-and-black-haired, shorts-wearing punk everyone knew had suddenly turned into a blond, pink-corseted, Marilyn Monroe-esque bombshell. Then there was her emotional return to live music at a run of festival gigs from the summer (“to see how the fans reacted in real life to my new songs was amazing and surreal… thousands of kids singing at the top of their lungs”) and a warts-and-all documentary, Billie Eilish: The World’s a Little Blurry, documenting her early years, which came out in February. When Eilish saw it she “literally sobbed all the way through it”. Why? “To see how young I was then and how much was going on and what I dealt with and coped with. I was also being proud of myself and also pitying myself and also being kind of envious of that girl, the 16-year-old me who was just so fearless and carefree.” She catches herself. “I had to snap out of it!” Written in Covid lockdowns, Happier Than Ever is a difficult but beautifully dreamy second album, largely about growing up, as songs such as Getting Older, My Future and Everybody Dies attest. Given that her career began at 13, when Eilish uploaded her first single, Ocean Eyes, to SoundCloud (by February this year, that track had hit 700m streams on Spotify), it’s fair to say she’s not had the typical adolescence. “I was always very scared of getting older – I dreaded it,” she says, crunching ice between her teeth as she twists her thoughts around. “And honestly, I have almost only found, besides a few hiccups, that I’ve been enjoying just having a little adulthood. Doing things for the first time like getting gas and doing laundry and calling your doctor on your own.” She laughs. “Normal shit! Not necessarily fun, but it’s exciting, isn’t it, just being a human.” The second album, however, made Eilish “super-worried”. Why? “The bigger you get, the more people hate your guts.” She felt this too when Finneas released his debut solo album, Optimist, in October. “I said, ‘Don’t forget what you felt when you first made this. You loved it.’ I think that we should all love our art the way that we loved it when we first made it, you know.” Eilish posted her Marilyn-styled UK Vogue cover on Instagram in May. It got a million likes in less than six minutes, her second record-breaking feat on the platform. “Proof that money can make you change your values and sell out!” railed a Daily Mail headline. “It was so much fun, that shoot,” Eilish says today. “It was playing dress-up, you know? Because” – her voice hardens against the haters – “that’s what a fucking photoshoot is.” She found it funny when some people responded to the shoot by saying she had become a different person, she continues. “I’m just playing around! You know, I’m allowed to wear anything I want at any time and so is everyone else. That was a fun thing to put out there in the world. You’re allowed to change. You’re also allowed to not change. You’re allowed to wear anything and say anything and do anything and be anything.” The shoot had a big effect on her: it made her feel more comfortable in her skin, she says. “I hated the way I looked before – I don’t love it now, but I feel a little more confident in myself and I’ve gotten a lot more proud of who I am and more open to things. I think [that shoot] opened my mind up for having an open mind in the future.” This year, she’s also ramped up her involvement in environmental activism, playing live at the 24-hour Global Citizen event, calling for urgent action before Cop26 and executive-producing a “food justice” documentary, They’re Trying to Kill Us. She doesn’t mind lending her fame to big causes – quite the opposite. “I mean, my God, what else is the point of it? We can do what we are capable of doing and I think that that’s really important. And again, I’m not invincible, but I try my best to fucking help the world, because, jeez, why not? Somebody has to.” The end of the year hasn’t seen her slacking off. In recent weeks, she’s launched a new perfume, Eilish, influenced by her synaesthesia and her interest in scent and memory (“I can’t wait for people to smell like how I dream they smell!”). She’s also due to host Saturday Night Live this week (“I don’t know anything about it yet – but I’m very, very, very fucking excited”) just before the biggest event of all – her 20th birthday. How’s she planning to leave her teens? Crunch.“I don’t know, really.” She recounts her favourite parties as a child: her mum would dress as a fairy, handing out treats, and little Billie would get puppies to play with, a “bounce house” and a piñata. For now, she’s happy living at 300 miles per hour, looking forward to the release of the new Pixar film, Turning Red, for which she and Finneas have provided songs, and listening non-stop to her latest obsession, Gorillaz (“I’ve known them my entire life, but it’s like they’ve taken over my body these last few weeks – I’ve become completely infatuated!”). What does she wish for next year? At first, she replies like the old teenager. “Gosh, I don’t know. There are so many unknowns, you know?” Then comes the new Billie. “I’ll just say I hope for joy and happiness and love and that’s really what I want. I don’t really care about anything else.”