Billie Eilish’s New Single is Inspired By Netflix’s ‘Roma’

It would appear that Billie Eilish <3s Netflix.

The 17-year-old singer, who goes by “wherearetheavocados” on Instagram (please, God, let her never change it to @OfficialBillieEilish) has drawn inspiration from Roma, Netflix’s Alfonso Cuarón-directed film chronicling a year in the life of a middle-class Mexico City family in the early 1970s, for her new single, “When I Was Older.”

“I'm watching movies back to back in black and white,” Eilish sings on the dreamy, disjointed new track, one of the only semi-direct references to the black-and-white Roma in the song’s lyrics (although as Stereogum points out, Eilish also refers to herself as “a sailor on an open sea,” and there’s a beach scene in Roma, so it all adds up, more or less.)

Most of the Roma references in “When I Was Older” are more conceptual, though; Eilish recorded the song with her older brother, Finneas O’Connell, Billboard reports, with the siblings saying in a statement, “When we were composing the song, we wanted to write from within the narrative of the movie and the scenes that struck us the most from it. Having access to the sounds used in the film proved to be invaluable to help us convey this.”

Music plays a key role in Roma itself, with music supervisor Lynn Faintchen telling Billboard, “All of the music is embedded in the story. It’s part of each scene.” Thus, it makes a strange kind of sense that the soundtrack would inspire a single of its own; we can’t wait to hear what strange magic the Eilish/O’Connell siblings wring out of Tidying Up with Marie Kondo.