“The Greatest” by Billie Eilish

"The Greatest", released on May 17, 2024, sits sixth on Hit Me Hard and Soft, Billie Eilish's third album, and it plays like a bruised confession. Eilish is singing to a partner who never registered how much she poured into the relationship, and the song works through defeat, loneliness and anger on its way to grieving what might have been. Plenty of listeners heard their own stories in it.

She wrote it with FINNEAS, who produced and recorded it, sings on it and plays guitar, bass, synth, glockenspiel and keyboards, the last alongside Eilish. Andrew Marshall adds drums and percussion, and the bridge goes soft on strings from Domenic Salerni and Amy Schroeder on violin, Nathan Schram on viola and Andrew Yee on cello. Jon Castelli and Aron Forbes mixed it, and it made the top 30 in the US and Canada.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.