Finneas O’Connell isn’t trying to be clever when he releases a song called “Naked” right before Coachella. He’s just practical. “I wanted something fun to open the show with,” he says. So he made a bouncy single about intimacy, emotional distance, and, yes, the ex who once saw you unclothed and now wouldn’t even recognize your voice.
“It’s that idea of how someone used to be your everything, and now they’re basically a stranger,” he explains. “That chorus had been sitting around for a year, and Coachella just felt like the perfect moment to drop it.”
He even leaned into the obvious: “I put up a billboard outside Coachella that said, ‘I’m performing Naked.’ Low-hanging fruit,” he adds, pun not so much avoided as embraced.
The track opens with a distorted confession—a mutated Finneas admitting, “I dated [blank] because I was a coward.” The clip comes from an old recording session with a Roland vocal transformer. “It was like therapy,” he says, citing The Office’s Survivor Man episode as a spiritual companion. “Just intrusive thoughts turned into voice memos.”
Despite the puns and playfulness, Naked follows a familiar Finneas blueprint—songs that hit the gut with surprising precision, whether they’re dressed in synth-pop or acoustic melancholy. That range is intentional. “All my favorite artists have breadth,” he says. “I try to make sure everything I sing feels true, no matter the style.”
But truth doesn’t always come with an easy melody. When talk turns to “The Kids Are All Dying,” a biting protest song he released in 2021, Finneas doesn’t soften the edges. “I can’t wait for that song to be irrelevant,” he says flatly. “I wish I’d thought, when I wrote it, that things were going to change. But I knew better. It’s hard to write about heartbreak when kids are being massacred in schools.”
He’s careful to walk the line between activism and exploitation. “The last thing I want is to commodify this,” he says. “But how can you not say something? Being a pop artist in times like these feels like baking a cake while the house is flooding.”
Finneas doesn’t want to be labeled a political artist—but he doesn’t want to shut up and sing either. “The human experience is everything. Love songs matter. Protest songs matter. It’s all part of being alive right now.”
As if that weren’t enough, he’s also been composing film scores. His most recent is Vengeance, B.J. Novak’s podcast-meets-Texas-murder-mystery film. “It was podcast-y meets spaghetti western,” he says, clearly delighted. “Whistles, bells, baritone guitars. It was a tonal playground.”
He also scored The Fallout, another gut-punch of a film centered around the aftermath of a school shooting. “That one was heavy, but so important,” he says. “I’ve always wanted to score movies—I’m just grateful people are letting me learn on the job.”
With all of that—solo records, Billy’s next album, film scores—you’d think burnout would be imminent. Not for him. “I stay inspired by doing different stuff,” he says. “The worst thing for me is doing the same thing every day. Variety is everything.”
He’s prolific—his word, not ours. “People misuse that term,” he adds. “It just means you make a lot. It doesn’t mean you’re brilliant.” (Though honestly, the catalog speaks for itself.)
Even when he’s writing for others—Justin Bieber, Ashe, and of course Billie Eilish—he’s not possessive. “I never regret giving a song away,” he says. “Hearing someone great sing something you wrote? That’s the best feeling.”
As for what’s next? Another solo single is coming in July. “Seasonally appropriate,” he teases. There’s also a full album in the works, though he won’t commit to a release date just yet. “Let’s just say there’s more where Naked came from.”
Watch the interview above and then check out the videos below.
