One of the characteristic qualities of a lot of Billie Eilish mixes is the way they manage to create a subjectively hard-hitting pop/EDM impression despite the essential fact that her vocal timbre is quite delicate, relying a great deal on ASMR-grade intimacy and breathiness. If you listen to a lot of her uptempo songs, you’ll hear that much of the backing is therefore actually quite dull-sounding, thereby leveraging the power of mix constrast to give the sense that Eilish’s voice is super-breathy and upfront, rather than relying on the massive injections of HF enhancement that many EDM producers fall back on. As a result, listeners can readily turn her records up loud enough to disassemble cheaper items of Ikea furniture without the mix’s upper spectrum ever getting fatiguing. Indeed, I was stood about 30 feet from the front of one of her big festival gigs last summer, and was impressed how easy her sound was on my ears compared with many of the other artists I heard from that vantage point – it was actually one of the very few shows that I felt able to listen to without earplugs!

Of course, it’s rarely possible to completely eliminate high end from your backing tracks without making the production as a whole sound muffled, and drum parts in particular often provide a kind of tonal frame of reference for the listener in this respect, so it’s interesting to hear how Eilish navigates this in her recent hit ‘Lunch’ – especially as the song helpfully ends with a couple of almost completely isolated bars of the main beat, which makes it easier to analyse! What’s particularly characteristic about this drum sound is that the brightness of each kick, snare, clap, and hi-hat is primarily concentrated right at the start of the hit. These provide a cue to the listener that the drums (and the production as a whole) have an appropriate upper-spectrum balance, but at the same time aren’t nearly as fatigung on the ear at higher playback volumes as more sustained high-frequency sounds like hissy cymbal hits or fizzy distorted guitars. In fact, if I use the outro’s isolated beat to phase-cancel those little transients out of a section of the song, it’s surprising how much overall brightness the production seems to lose. Transients In: play_arrow | get_app Transients Out: play_arrow | get_app It’s not a new trick, this, to be fair – I wrote about something similar going on in Miley Cyrus’s 'Midnight Sky' a few years back, for instance, but it nevertheless feels to me like a bit of an Eilish hallmark these days.

But there’s something else worth highlighting about this drum beat that relates to a recent Cambridge-MT patron Q&A response I wrote to the question ‘How can I fix a plodding groove?’, because this production is a classic example of a beat which very much skips along by virtue of two important programming features. Firstly, the main quarter-note beats are heavily favoured over the eighth-note off-beats in the balance – the quarter notes are both much meatier in tone and louder in the mix balance. And, secondly, the programmer has resisted the temptation to add further metric subdivisions (in this case sixteenth notes) to the programming, which is something that can quickly make a beat feel like it’s becoming more sluggish. Yes, a sixteenth-note tambourine does appear during the outro, which could have been risky, but even if this hadn’t been at a point in the song where the groove’s momentum was already well established, the tambourine’s potential for groove-dampening is also mitigated by the heavier four-to-the-floor kick pattern adding further emphasis to the main quarter-note beats at that point, and the fact that the tambourine not only appears fairly low in the mix balance again, but also itself significantly favours its eighth-note beats over the sixteenth-note subdivisions.

As with a lot of the best-selling albums of all time, Metallica’s Black Album has had a lot written about it. In particular, a number of pundits have asserted that one of the secrets to the band’s crossover success with this record was Lars Ulrich adapting his previous thrash-metal drumming style into a slower and simpler heavy-rock sound. But what bothers me about that assessment is that it often seems to be framed as a kind of ‘dumbing down’, whereas I think that the drum part on this particular song is tremendous. I’m no drummer, though, so this has nothing to do with an appreciation of the finer points of his performance technique – it’s all about the drum arrangement for me.

For a start, the drums provide great differentiation between the main song sections. The rumbling tom patterns of the intro (0:16-0:55), middle section (3:18-3:57), and outro (from 4:39), for instance, clearly set those sections apart from the verses, prechoruses, and choruses, while the half-time snare backbeat of the prechorus creates a clear contrast with the more traditional dual backbeats of the verses and choruses. Ulrich’s definition of the section boundaries is also very effective. Notice those lovely long eighth-note ramp-ups into the main riff (at 0:51) and final chorus (3:53), for example, as well as the shorter ones at the ends of the prechoruses (1:32, 2:24, and 3:03); or the rest bar that punctuates the end of each chorus under the line “off to Never Never Land” (1:45, 2:37, and 3:16). There are some lovely musical fills too, such as at 3:40 where two eighth-note tom rolls are followed by a backbeat snare/cymbal accent, or at 3:44 and 3:48 where other off-beat snare/cymbal accents are slotted nicely between the vocal phrases.

However, there’s one specific aspect of the drum part that I really love, and that’s the way Ulrich has taken the main guitar riff’s characteristic anticipated downbeat, and comprehensively woven that idea into the fabric of song’s rhythm. On the most basic level, the idea of the drums ‘pushing’ the downbeat of a bar (as you can hear the drums and guitars doing together for the first time when the riff first comes in at 0:54) is a great way to add urgency to any rock track – almost like the drummer is straining at the leash to rush ahead of the rest of the band! So the fact that this production features dozens of such pushed downbeats already provides a tremendous sense of energy and aggression. But rather than being merely a surface device, these pushes actually serve a profound structural purpose too, because although the riff, verse, and prechorus sections all have pushed downbeats, crucially the choruses don’t, which I think gives them a fabulous extra sense of weight and ‘arrival’.

But that’s not all, because the off-beat snare/cymbal accents also fulfil both short-term and long-term musical functions, in my opinion. On the micro-level, they deliver the same sense of rhythmic agitation that the kick-drum section-downbeat pushes do, but are sprinkled around much more liberally in all sorts of other metric locations to keep catching you by surprise – especially during the intro and outro sections. There’s also a cool kind of tug-of-war going on throughout the whole song between the off-beat and on-beat snares. Notice that the intro has only pushed snares, whereas the subsequent riff, verse, and prechorus sections (0:55-1:34) only have on-beat snares, but then the chorus combines both on-beat and off-beat snares. I also love the way that the middle section returns to the off-beat snares of the introduction, but that there’s a single on-beat snare smuggled in at 3:42 to help draw attention to the change from a spoken to a sung vocal texture at that point. And, in a sense, this forms the midway point of a long-term development from the intro, with its exclusively off-beat snares, to the outro’s more liberal intermingling of on-beat and off-beat snares.

But, of course, no discussion of the pushes in this song would be complete without praising one of the song’s best production hooks: the surprise return of the drums and main riff with the snare/cymbal off-beat accent at 4:27. There are plenty of songs where this stunt might have just sounded like a cheap gimmick, but the fact that it’s clearly cut from the same cloth as all the other off-beat accents makes it seem much more powerful and considered – notwithstanding James Hetfield’s borderline-comic “boo!”