Yes, You've Definitely Heard The True Detective: Night Country Theme Song Before
This post contains spoilers for the premiere of "True Detective: Night Country."
Historically, "True Detective" theme songs have always been unusual earworms. In its first season, The Handsome Family's "Far From Any Road" set a strange tone with its percussive arrangement, deep twang, and lyrics like "When the last light warms the rocks/And the rattlesnakes unfold/Mountain cats will come to drag away your bones." Mix in the intro's moody, cloudy, sometimes objectifying silhouette shots, and viewers got a good sense of what "True Detective" was all about. Season 2 kept the silhouettes but replaced the country tune with Leonard Cohen's gravelly, whispery "Nevermind," while the show's third season featured blues singer Son Houses' "Death Letter Blues."
"True Detective" returns this week with a new title ("True Detective: Night Country") and a new theme song, and this time the show's signature tune is far from obscure. Instead, it's Billie Eilish's triple platinum, Billboard-topping 2019 hit "bury a friend." Given the skeptical approach fans of the original "True Detective" take to each new season, the inclusion of mainstream pop artist Eilish might leave some scratching their heads. But if you can forget all the times you've heard it before and listen to the song with fresh ears, it's actually a perfect fit for this wickedly thrilling new story.
Eilish's song may be popular, but it's still perfectly creepy
For all her popularity, Eilish has long-since been the patron saint of creepy cool girls everywhere. Her debut studio album, "When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?" incorporates ASMR-like whispers, vocal distortions, and the sounds of knives sharpening and dental drills, per Insider. Though the songs may seem too familiar to trigger a bodily response now, they're clearly designed to deliver chills and feel almost uncomfortably immersive. In other words, Eilish's musical style — especially on songs like nightmarish "bury a friend" — perfectly matches the new HBO show's rare ability to get under viewers' skin.
Speaking of creepy cool girls, it's clear from the first episode that "True Detective: Night Country" is all about them. In the premiere, viewers meet the tough, seemingly unshakeable women of a remote Alaska town that doesn't see sunlight for long stretches of the year. These are the type of women who will gut a wolf without a second thought, who will stare down a polar bear, and won't bat an eye at the discovery of a severed human tongue on a kitchen floor. This casually macabre sensibility lines up perfectly with Eilish's song, which features such grossly memorable lyrics as "step on the glass, staple your tongue" and "my limbs all froze and my eyes won't close."
A nightmare in a town that never sees day
Eilish says she wrote the song based on an experience that's both harrowing and common: an episode of sleep paralysis. "I have these terrifying dreams," she told Ok! Magazine (per Uproxx). "Sleep paralysis, night terrors. It's like the whole night is terrifying and then I wake up." It's easy to see how this description also aligns with the plot of "True Detective: Night Country," which writer and showrunner Issa López set during a horrifying "night" that stretches on for weeks. While the middle seasons of "True Detective" were more grounded in reality, it's already clear that "True Detective: Night Country" takes inspiration from the first season's sense of cosmic terror and borderline magical realism. Some moments from the premiere seem to bleed fully into supernatural territory, but then again, sleep paralysis demons seem real in the dead of night, too.
There are also direct lyrical connections between Eilish's song and "True Detective: Night Country." The song touches on self-destructive tendencies, violence, the death of a loved one, body horror, and personal violation, all of which seem to be realities of life in the town of Ennis, Alaska, and the grim world of "True Detective." The show's first episode includes townsfolk drunk driving, hallucinating (or seeing visions, perhaps), and, in one case, whacking an abuser upside the head with a bucket. "Honestly, I thought that I would be dead by now," Eilish sings alongside Mehki Raine in the song's second verse, a line that echoes the world-weary attitudes of the show's death-chasing characters.
'She's awake'
The wake-sleep-nightmare dichotomy of "bury a friend" describes the feeling of Alaskan winter in general, but it also may be a reference to the monster lurking around the show's edges. In one quick scene from the premiere, a little Alaska Native girl draws a woman with bloody, dripping hands. "Local legend," her mother says, by way of explanation to her white boyfriend.
Two other characters in the episode — the man in the opening scene and Detective Navarro (Kali Reis) — hear the whispered phrase "She's awake" in their heads. Could the woman in the picture be the one who's "awake"? It's too soon to tell, but in the meantime, Eilish's dread-filled lyrics capture the show's sense of mounting unease and dreaminess perfectly: "Why aren't you scared of me?/Why do you care for me?/When we all fall asleep, where do we go?"
"True Detective: Night Country" airs on HBO and streams on Max Sundays at 9 pm PT/ET.