Billie Eilish Reveals She Had a Weight 'Strapped' to Her to Shoot Underwater “Hit Me Hard and Soft” Album Cover

"I need to suffer," the pop star said of making her album art on the Tuesday, May 21 episode of 'The Late Show with Stephen Colbert'

Billie Eilish will "suffer" for her art.

During the Tuesday, May 21 episode of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, the pop star, 22, opened up about the lengths she went through to make the cover art for her album Hit Me Hard and Soft.

After noting that her "very real" cover art was not photoshopped, Eilish took Stephen Colbert through the process of making it the day after the 2024 Grammys.

Related: Billie Eilish Announces 'Hit Me Hard and Soft' World Tour Dates

"I had gone to sleep at 7 a.m," she recalled. "I woke up, I dyed my hair black — it was like bright red — I dyed it black that day. Then I went to this random place in Santa Clarita or some nonsense."

Eilish continued: "There's a tank in this giant place, and it was, like, 10-feet deep. And I popped my little ass in there, and I was in there for six hours."

The "Lunch" artist noted that she was not only "fully clothed" while underwater — "I was wearing big long pants, giant shorts, a thermal long-sleeve, a button-up flannel, a tie, rings, arm warmers, bracelet and a weight — I had a weight strapped to me," Eilish added.

She noted that the weight was used to keep her down.

"Whose idea was it? Yours? 'Guys it could be so cool if I cold almost die,'" the host, 60, asked Eilish, to which she replied: "Dude, I've done it so many times — almost died in these shoots. It's like I need to suffer."

She added, "You know what it really is? It's not like, 'What can I do that will be the most uncomfortable that I could possibly dream of?' It's more that I think about the visual before I think about how it's gonna make me feel. So, it's like okay, I want to be fully dressed, underwater, eyes open, upside down, and then I deal with how horrible it is."

Eilish said she didn't have a nose plug, so she was "basically waterboarding myself for six hours."

"A lot of my inspirations for the visuals on this album were optical illusion-type things. Things that just make you question it or think about it for longer," she concluded.

During her time on The Late Show, Eilish also performed her new single "Lunch."

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Related: Billie Eilish and Finneas 'Have Never Ever Ever Loved Something More' than New Album Hit Me Hard and Soft

The "Bad Guy" musician released her third studio album Hit Me Hard and Soft on Friday, May 17.

Instead of sharing singles before the release as she did for her previous two records (2019's When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? and 2021's Happier Than Ever), Eilish dropped the 10-track project all at once.

This fall, the nine-time Grammy winner will hit the road for an arena tour in support of Hit Me Hard and Soft. The tour, produced by Live Nation, will kick off in North America in September 2024, before continuing in Australia in February 2025. Then, she'll travel to Europe, the U.K., and Ireland starting in April until late July 2025, per a press release.

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