Premiered on triple j this week, Keep Up sees Eilish reaching new heights with a triumphant return to the brand of emotional pop-electronica with which she’s made a name for herself. The song features wickedly smart co-production by Eilish and Japanese Wallpaper and was mixed by Konstantin Kersting (Mallrat, Jungle Giants, Tia Gostelow).
Keep Up sits on the spectrum between the infectious mastery of Gilligan’s 2018 singles (’S.M.F.Y.’ and ‘Patterns’) and her recent single ’The Pull’ (a gorgeous piano-led ballad). It opens delicately before exploding with a chorus that showcases Gilligan’s gift for melody and the extraordinary power and range of her vocals.
Eilish spent the better part of 2018 earning legions of fans as they discovered her spectral and artful dance music. Breakout singles S.M.F.Y. and Patterns exemplify Eilish’s unique mix of a classically trained voice, bold pop sensibility and cutting edge production; here is an artist with a singular style of deeply intelligent, super-emo but mega-fun electronic music, with a mind to make you move.
LISTEN TO ‘KEEP UP’ HERE
Of the song, Eilish says “When I was younger I was entrenched in a friendship group that I loved with my whole heart – that love that’s only possible when you’re in your early 20s, when you’re first navigating the real world, your hungover teenage insecurities; it’s when your friendships can sometimes feel closer than family.
During that time a good friend of mine told me that my laugh is loud, idiosyncratic, and that it’s unbelievably easy to make me laugh – like making a toddler laugh. All of these things are true – and I know they meant to tell me this as a compliment, like it’s cute and nice that I’m always laughing. Now that I’m a little older, I can be proud of the fact that I laugh my stupid loud laugh a lot – but at the time, it made me feel very uncool, like some kind of bumbling, giggling idiot.
Keep Up is about that woozy year, where I felt just a little too uncool to be hanging out with such a fascinating, exciting and loving group of people. The song highlights the moments where I felt the most at home – dancing barefoot in the kitchen in a shitty sharehouse with a stranger who soon became one of my best friends (we’d leave that mouldy house for the last time together in a years’ time, both giving it the finger on the way out), driving up and down the empty streets with a full car playing Fergalicious at full volume, drunk poloroids, unqualified DJing at the Brunswick Hotel. It was a really joyous and really miserable time in my life and I love Keep Up for putting a pretty beautiful frame around it.
Next week Eilish will hit the road with Montaigne on her ‘For Your Love’ national tour.
Eilish Gilligan – Tour Dates
April 11 – Factory Theatre, Sydney
April 12 – Corner Hotel, Melbourne
April 24 – Lion Arts Centre, Adelaide
April 26 – Free.Social, Fremantle
April 27 – The Brightside, Brisbane