Review and setlist: Billie Eilish, hitting hard and soft at Wells Fargo Center in South Philly

All was not morose at the sports complex in South Philly on Saturday night.

Just as the Phillies were getting Red October off to a deeply concerning start at Citizens Bank Park, Billie Eilish was across the street preparing to brighten the mood at the sold-out Wells Fargo Center.

Not that Eilish, who came to town on her “Hit Me Hard and Soft: The Tour” that had kicked off in Quebec earlier in the week, traffics in especially cheery pop music.

In fact, as my concertgoing companion, who’s 14, said to me after spending the day digging into Eilish’s three-album oeuvre: “I didn’t realize how many of Billie’s songs are sad.”

They often are — particularly those from her 2019 goth-pop full-length debut, When We Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? and its 2021 semi-ironically titled follow-up, Happier Than Ever.

But it’s not just the sense of disaffection and melancholy that’s the key to how the still just-22-year-old California songwriter has won an enormous audience and universal acclaim while already winning nine Grammys and two best song Oscars.

It’s also the craftsmanship and musical élan that has marked the entire body of work that she’s created along with her older brother and chief collaborator, Finneas O’Connell, who is not accompanying Eilish on tour for the first time, while he’s out promoting his own album, For Cryin’ Out Loud!

The fruitful pairing of the O’Connell siblings — Eilish is a middle name — dates all the way back to “Ocean Eyes,” her debut single released when she was 15, which she performed as part of a three-song solo piano medley late in her fast-paced, 90-minute, 23-song set that expertly balanced state-of-the-art spectacle with unguarded intimacy.

Along with all the very good songs — which draw on electro-pop and hip-hop, torch song and bossa nova — it’s that ability to communicate in an unfiltered and unaffected way and present a sincere, authentic-seeming self that is really the secret to Eilish’s success.

And also why her two-thirds female, gay and straight, Gen Z and millennial audience was only too happy to wait in lines that wound halfway around the arena concourse to buy $50 T-shirts.

At Wells Fargo, Eilish performed “in the round,” although the stage set up in the middle of the arena was rectangular with a platform that intermittently lifted her high above the arena floor, close to the rafters where multisided video screens brought her up close to the adoring audience.

She wore mismatched tube socks, bike shorts, and a Sixers shirt that (oddly) advertised Chevrolets on the back. The show started with Hit Me Hard and Soft’s Nine Inch Nails-ish, industrial-textured “Chihiro,” named after the protagonist of Hayao Miyazaki’s 2001 animated fantasy film Spirited Away, and ended with the album’s catchy current single, “Birds of a Feather.”

Eilish got her steps in moving athletically around the elongated stage, which featured two orchestra pit-style lowered recesses where members of her four-piece band backed her up through the evening. They were joined by two backup singers — Ava Horner, with whom Eilish said she had been singing “since middle school,” and Jane Horner, whom she described as Ava’s “hot older sister.”

Hit Me Hard and Soft is Eilish’s lustiest album, and most openly sexual. On Saturday, she got right to it with the hungry “Lunch,” which rhymes “it’s a craving not a crush” with “I could eat that girl for lunch,” and “Yeah, she dances on my tongue, tastes like she could be the one.”

Later, as she took to an auxiliary stage for “Guess,” the song about underwear by Charli XCX that Eilish guested on a remix of, she rapped “Charli likes boys, but she knows I’d hit it.” Unfortunately, Charli, who played the Wells Fargo 11 days earlier, was not available for a guest appearance. (An opportunity was also missed with no surprise cameo by Philly rapper Armani White, who performed his viral hit “Billie Eilish” with her at a festival in Canada in 2023.)

» READ MORE: From Billie Eilish to Charli XCX, Sabrina Carpenter to André 3000, here are 25 (and more) concerts we are excited about

Among the evening’s highlights was a three-song mini set in which the Horner sisters came up to the surface-level stage to join Eilish as she sat on a stool and backed herself on acoustic guitar on the delicate “Male Fantasy.”

The sibling harmonizers wrapped themselves around Eilish’s whispery voice on “Skinny” and “TV,” the latter of which subtly warns against the dangers of being distracted by nonessential matters when matters of grave concern should be paramount: “The internet’s gone wild watching movie stars on trial, while they’re overturning Roe v. Wade.”

The centerpiece of the show came earlier on, however, when Eilish sat cross-legged at center stage and asked for something that’s pretty much unheard of at an oversized pop show: a moment of silence.

She needed it for music purposes, so she could sing a cappella, and have her voice instantly recorded and looped in layers over itself as a vocal bed to cushion what would slowly build into a lush, emotive iteration of her 2018 single “When the Party’s Over.”

Eilish pulled the nifty trick off with ease, once a few excitable fans who couldn’t help but scream out their love for her were told to quiet down in no uncertain terms by their fellow audience members.

It was a performance of stark beauty, demonstrating Eilish’s ability to hold the crowd in thrall with just the power of her own voice. And it was a quiet beginning to a song that, as the band joined in, rose in volume to shake the arena. First she hits you soft, so she can then hit you hard.

Billie Eilish setlist, Wells Fargo Center in Philadelphia, Oct. 5, 2024.

1. “Chihiro”

2. “Lunch”

3. “NDA”

4. “Therefore I Am”

5. “Wildflower”

6. “When The Party’s Over”

7. “The Diner”

8. “Ilomilo”

9. “Bad Guy”

10. “The Greatest”

11. “Male Fantasy”

12. “Skinny”

13. “TV”

14. “Bury A Friend”

15. “Oxytocin”

16. “You Should See Me In A Crown”

17. “Guess (Remix)”

18. “Everything I Wanted”

19. “Lovely” / “Idontwannabeyouanymore / “Ocean Eyes”

20. “L’Amour De Ma Vie”

21. “What Was I Made For?”

22. “Happier Than Ever”

23. “Birds Of A Feather”