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| Billie Eilish at Academy Museum |
True Detective's fourth season features Billie Eilish's "Bury A Friend" as its title sequence music. Still, the pop singer's impact on the program extends much farther, as showrunner and director Issa Lopez revealed in a recent interview.
"After the show's Sunday premiere, I began writing it during the lockdown and I was listening to Billie Eilish day and night," Lopez said to Indiewire on Monday. Billy's poetry, sadness, and sarcasm informed much of what was happening in the series. And then that specific song was really strange because it made me think of all the horrors that are in the performance, like stepping on glass, burying a buddy, and using the tongue.
Star Jodie Foster discovers a severed tongue on the floor at the film's premiere and walks on shattered glass, which, as Indiewire points out, causes Foster's character to experience a flashback. In the song "Bury a Friend," the line "step on the glass, staple your tongue" appears.
Lopez went on, "Then, as I was writing, I noticed the lyrics, and I thought, 'That's crazy.'" It's crazy because every aspect of the series appears in the song one after another.
"Bury a Friend" is such a dark, brooding, fun, scary little tune that I felt it could certainly work," Lopez said when asked about the decision to include it in the opening credits.
Alan Sepinwall, the main television writer for Rolling Stone, praised True Detective's fourth season, calling it a return to form after the show's disappointing first two seasons starring Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson. Foster and Kali Reis in particular received special recognition.