“You guys have been waiting for this,” Billie Eilish captioned the (Tuesday) Jan. 19 Instagram post announcing, “Lo Vas A Olvidar,” her long-spoken team-up with Rosalía. Billie, 19, wasn’t kidding, as fans have been craving this collab for almost a year. The song, released on Jan. 21, came with an accompanying video, one that saw Billie and Rosalía in a barren, featureless environment. Throughout the song, Billie sings in Spanish (“Dime si no me perdonas, um / Cargar con to’ este veneno no es bueno.”) It’s a haunting, ethereal track that is heavy on atmosphere.
The English lyrics match those in Spanish, in terms of message: “I needed to go ’cause I needed to know you don’t need me / You been put your soul but it seems like you don’t even see me / You sayin’ to me like that it something I have any choice and / Like if wasn’t important why would you waste all your poison,” sings Billie.
The song was made for HBO’s Euphoria (specifically, for the soundtrack of “Part Two: Jules”). This collab has been cooking for quite a while. Rosalía first tweeted “can’t wait to finish our song” in March 2019, along with a photo of her with Billie, per Billboard. Rosalia also spoke about the collab in April 2020. “I have this little studio, this little setup that I did here in one room,” she said to Apple Music’s Zane Lowe, per Billboard. “I have the basics like just the midi keyboard, the computer, just with the mic, and I do my basics and try to do all the vocal production for the next record. I’m working on that on the next record. And I’m trying to finish.”
“During these two last weeks, I have been trying to finish the Billie Eilish collab,” she added. “I think it’s getting quite close. I think that the arrangements, I think that yesterday I finished the arrangements. I feel like the production, the sound design is almost done, so I just need Billie to send the vocals and they send me the ideas that they want to add because we are there.”
“Lo Vas A Olvidar” marks the first new music from Billie since she closed out 2020 with “Therefore I Am.” The song continued the sound that made When We Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? a critical and commercial success, and could be considered a victory lap for Billie (who swept the prior Grammy awards, dominated the charts, and became a superstar all before she was legally old enough to drink.)
“This song is very, very up for interpretation. I’m very curious to see what people get from it and also what they feel when they hear it. I don’t know. But yeah, it’s a little mean. I love it,” she said when speaking to Zane Lowe in November. “It was very fun to complete. It was fun to record, especially because it’s like … I feel like you can hear it. I feel that I sound very much like … I’m just f-king around. I’m just joking and … You know that? Like, stop. What the hell are you talking about? It’s like, come on. It’s so real. I feel like a natural, and don’t take me seriously, you know? I love it.
“It feels like me. I feel like the rest of them also feel like me, but I think this one is more like … If I think about it from an outside perspective, this one I’d be satisfied if I was a fan,” she added. The song was her third single of the year, following “my future,” and the theme for the delayed-James Bond movie, “No Time To Die.”
