Bond songs are, for the most part, exercises in euphoric or profoundly-troubled bombast.
They are not subtle but then are they are not lacking in elegance either, something brought beautifully to life by Billie Eilish, fresh from winning a swag of Grammy Awards, who invests a whole lot of angst and world-weariness into a song that Rolling Stone thinks, and I’m apt to agree, exactly how Bond himself is feeling after a long time in the spy game …
SNAPSHOT
“‘No Time to Die’, which shares a title with the upcoming film, lacks the bombast and brass of many previous Bond themes, but it does capture something essential about the character: a roving secret agent who has no time for love, no time for lies, and certainly no time to die. The track kicks off with sparse, ominous piano, swelling tensely until Eilish’s singular voice comes in: ‘I should have known/I’d leave alone/Just goes to show/That the blood you bleed is just the blood you own.'”
There’s a common misconception that slow and atmospheric means less intensity but that’s not the case, and certainly not with “No Time to Die” which captures all the darkness, loss and pain of getting near the end of fighting the good night and wondering what has been gained?
That’s a lot of existential crisis for one song but it works and works so powerfully well that you feel every last drop of disillusion and exhaustion in every word and every note.
You can watch this very musical therapy session usher in No Time to Die premieres in UK on 31 March before opening there on 2 April, in Australia on 8 April and USA on 10 April.