How Billie Eilish Inspired ‘True Detective’ Season 4’s Opening Song and Beyond

Season 4 of True Detective: Night Country debuted last Sunday (Jan. 14), and viewers who also double as Billie Eilish fans were met with a fun surprise during the season premiere.

While the pop artist recently won a Golden Globe alongside her brother FINNEAS for the Barbie ballad “What Was I Made For?”, her single “Bury A Friend” seems to have been made perfectly for the anthology crime drama, according to showrunner Issa López.

While speaking with IndieWire, López said the 2019 song — which was released as part of Eilish’s album WHEN WE FALL ASLEEP, WHERE DO WE GO? — is “such a dark, moody, fun, sinister little song that [she] thought it could absolutely work” as the musical backdrop for the show’s Season 4 intro.

Eilish’s impact even surpassed the opening credits, as López explained that she began writing Season 4 of True Detective “during the lockdown,” a time when she was “listening day and night” to Eilish.

“Billie’s irony and melancholy and poetry informed a lot of what was happening in the series,” she said, even to the point where Eilish’s lyrics made their way into not just the audio, but what viewers see on screen in the new season’s premiere episode starring Jodie Foster and Kali Reis, titled “Cold Case Files.”

“And then that particular song, it was so weird because I thought of the tongue and burying a friend and stepping on glass — all of the things that are in the show,” she said, which align with Eilish’s lyrics “Step on the glass, staple your tongue” and the song title, “Bury a friend.”

As she “started to pay attention to the lyrics,” she said she realized how “insane” it was that “‘one by one, all the elements of the series are in the song.'”

López iterated similar sentiments to Business Insider, highlighting that she “knew that the series was going to need a powerful anthem,” which she found in “Bury A Friend.”

“When we were doing the titles, I tried several things and then I realized that the lyrics of this song seem to be written for the series,” she recalled.

López told Business Insider that the titles were made by Peter Anderson, whom she called “an absolute genius.” Anderson, who also worked on Good Omens and Bad Sisters, helped drop “a lot of clues” in the titles, she added.

As for whether “the events of the show happened because [she] was listening to Billie,” López played coy. The showrunner told IndieWire, “it’s perfectly possible,” but refused to “confirm or deny.”

True Detective: Night Country is now streaming on Max.