How Billie Eilish’s ‘Irony and Melancholy’ Influenced ‘True Detective’ Season 4

Billie Eilish’s “Bury A Friend” serves as the title sequence music for True Detective’s fourth season, but as the show’s director and showrunner Issa Lopez explained in a new interview, the pop singer’s influence on the show goes much deeper.

“I started writing it during the lockdown, and I was listening day and night to Billie Eilish,” Lopez told Indiewire on Monday following the show’s Sunday premiere. “Billie’s irony and melancholy and poetry informed a lot of what was happening in the series. And then that particular song, it was so weird because I thought of the tongue and burying a friend and stepping on glass — all of the things that are in the show.”

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In the premiere, star Jodie Foster finds a severed tongue on the ground and steps on broken glass, which as Indiewire notes, triggers a flashback for Foster’s character. “Bury a Friend” includes lyrics “step on the glass, staple your tongue.”

Lopez continued, “Then as I was writing, I started to pay attention to the lyrics, and I was like, ‘That’s insane. That’s insane that one by one, all the elements of the series are in the song.’”

About the choice to select “Bury a Friend” for the opening credits, Lopez noted, “It’s such a dark, moody, fun, sinister little song that I thought it could absolutely work.”

Rolling Stone chief television critic Alan Sepinwall called True Detective’s fourth season a return to form following a forgettable two seasons following the show’s hit season one with Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson, heaping particular praise for Season 4 stars Foster and Kali Reis.

“The end result is a lean, mean, six-episode season that retains most of what was great under [original series creator Nic] Pizzolatto, while leaving behind the more self-indulgent or outright clumsy parts of those years,” Sepinwall wrote. “The energy between Foster (whose raspy growl is a perfect fit for an antisocial, my-way-or-the-highway veteran cop) and Reis (a former boxer with screen presence to spare) crackles throughout.”

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