True Detective Season 4, Night Country, continues the HBO crime anthology series’ tradition of including killer tunes over its title sequences. So, who sings True Detective Season 4’s opening song?
Who Sings True Detective Season 4’s Opening Song?
Billie Eilish sings True Detective Season 4’s opening song, “Bury a Friend.” The singer-songwriter also penned the track, which is the third single from her 2019 debut album, When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?
“Bury a Friend” was a major influence on True Detective Season 4’s showrunner, Issa López, who listened to it (along with Eilish’s wider discography) while writing Night Country. “I started writing [True Detective Season 4] during the lockdown, and I was listening day and night to Billie Eilish,” she told IndieWire. “Billie’s irony and melancholy and poetry informed a lot of what was happening in the series.”
Related: Who Is Otis Heiss in True Detective Season 4?
“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,” López continued. “Then as I was writing, I started to pay attention to the lyrics, and I was like, ‘That’s insane. That’s insane that one by one, all the elements of the series are in the song.'”
The unintentional overlap between Eilish’s lyrics and López scripts wasn’t the only reason why “Bury a Friend” wound up playing over True Detective Season 4’s opening, though. According to López, the song is “really f**king nicely female,” making it a good fit for Night Country. The showrunner also praised the “dark, moody, fun, sinister” qualities of “Bury of Friend” and noted its potential to catch viewers by surprise.
“I love the fact that it’s so unexpected,” López explained. “It doesn’t seem that we are going to suddenly cut to Billie Eilish, but it just works so well.”
True Detective: Night Country is currently streaming on HBO and Max, with new episodes dropping on Sundays.
