It was arguably in 1973, with Paul McCartney & Wings stepping up to perform “Live and Let Die” for the Bond film of the same name (for the song must always have the same name), that the importance of cultivating the perfect “Bond theme” by a popular musical artist of the moment was most firmly established. At the time, it was Roger Moore (much underrated as a Bond) who was starring in the franchise on the regular, and the dramatic sound of McCartney’s Academy Award-nominated song was in somewhat of a contrast to the blaxploitation overtones of the movie (set mostly in Harlem and centered around an illegal drug trade run by “Mr. Big,” before Carrie’s came along).
As time wore on, expectations for a Bond movie’s lead song for the soundtrack became higher and higher, and included placing even more of a premium on attracting the most “relevant” musicians. In the 80s, Sheena Easton, Duran Duran and A-ha all had their moments to contribute to the sonic lexicon of James Bond’s narrative. In the 90s, too, the “musician du jour” method persisted in terms of selecting who would perform the song as well–Sheryl Crow’s “Tomorrow Never Dies” and Garbage’s “The World Is Not Enough” being the peak exhibits of the alt-rock flavor that summed up the decade.
With Billie Eilish, who seems thus far slated to be categorized in the more “timeless” musical artists section of pop culture, her “of the momentness” feels different from others tapped to do the theme in the past. As though she might be that rare breed to transcend the frozen in time effect of most Bond tracks as a result of avoiding the typical and expected instrumentation that has come to be expected (all drenched in “spy grooves” that gradually become more and more prominent as the song escalates to its crescendo). Something even Adele fell prey to with “Skyfall.”
With similarities to the sound and style of her most recent single, “everything i wanted,” the slow, controlled pacing of “No Time To Die” is underscored by Eilish’s slightly quavering voice, as she rues, “We were a pair/But I saw you there/Too much to bear/You were my life, but life is far away from fair/Was I stupid to love you?/Was I reckless to help?/Was it obvious to everybody else?” Echoing the current narrative in Bond’s (currently played by Knives Out darling Daniel Craig) own life, the song gives plenty of clues about an imminent betrayal, or at least a heartbreak involving Madeleine Swann (Léa Seydoux)–a Proustian name indeed. For a man like Bond is destined to forever be doomed in matters of the heart (kind of like fellow British spy, Austin Powers). That the majority of titles in the franchise possess the word “die” in it speaks more than anything else to Bond’s own heart dying time and time again. The sort of fatalistic melancholy of it being more suited to the person Eilish constantly seems to be usurping of late, Lana Del Rey.
Where other songs speak less to the loss of love, Eilish’s contribution, quintessential to her own style of dark moodiness, is already so tailor-made to the trope of what a Bond theme is, that it inherently comes across as her own. As a song that could just as easily be a non-related single from her sophomore record (it’s sort of tantamount to how Madonna and longtime producer Mirwais made 2002’s “Die Another Day” so their own that they tacked it onto 2003’s American Life and it fit in perfectly with the rest of the sound of the record). It seems to signal a new era in the Bond world (along with the movie being given some extensive rewrites by none other than Fleabag brainchild Phoebe Waller-Bridge)–one filled with less machismo and more emotionalism. And again, one has to ask: how the fuck was Lana Del Rey not asked to do this song?
