Billie Eilish roars and whispers in her home show at the Forum

Billie Eilish sat cross-legged on the Kia Forum stage like a kindergarten teacher calming her class for storytelling.

The 22-year-old pop superstar had just gathered the voices of thousands as they sang – or rather, shouted – along to Eilish’s song “Lunch,” in which she enjoys the body of a woman “dancing on mine.” Tongue, tastes like she’s the one.” Now, about half an hour into her sold-out concert on Sunday night, she wanted to try something different: Using slow, soothing words, Eilish asked the crowd to calm down so she could use a Looping software was able to create a small Billies choir in “When the Party Is Over.”

The silence that followed was breathtaking in its fullness: a pleasingly counterintuitive demonstration of the intense admiration she was barely containing.

Sunday’s show was the first of a five-day hometown stand.

(Jason Armond/Los Angeles Times)

The first of five dates scheduled through Saturday at Inglewood Arena, Sunday’s performance opened a stand in her hometown that will conclude Eilish’s North American tour following “Hit Me Hard and Soft,” which came out in May, and the usual Numbers and praise earned nominations for album, record and song of the year at the Grammy Awards in February. The LP, her third, delivers the clean, detailed electro-goth sound that she and her brother-slash-producer Finneas have been known for since Eilish broke through at age 13 with her viral hit “Ocean Eyes.”

But the album also explores new emotional terrain—particularly around her feelings about queer desire—and showcases new elements of Eilish’s vocals, which once tended toward light and whispers and have become throatier and more muscular with age.

Dressed in a soccer jersey and bike shorts, her long dark hair tucked under a backwards ball cap, Eilish alternated between cheers and confessions at the Forum, skipping across the wide rectangular stage as she belted out “Chihiro” and her oldie “Bad Guy.” Then she huddled with her two backup singers — friends of hers since middle school, she pointed out — for “Your Power,” a haunting acoustic ballad about an abusive character.

“To everyone in the room – but especially to all the women in the room – I want you to know that you are safe here and you are seen,” she said before this number.

For “The Greatest,” which features perhaps the new album’s most impressive vocal moment, Eilish climbed onto a moving platform that raised her high above the stage: just the right starting point from which to unleash her confident rock howl. To honor both the upcoming holiday and the atmosphere of her hometown, she sang a lovely version of “I’ll Be Home for Christmas,” playing with the song’s melody to highlight its lush melancholy.

Billie Eilish performs.

(Jason Armond/Los Angeles Times)

This tour (which will take place again next year in Australia and Europe) is Eilish’s first without Finneas as a member of her band. But after introducing him as “my original, only bandmate,” Finneas showed up on Sunday to close the show with his sister. Together they performed “What Was I Made For?” — the Oscar-winning “Barbie” ballad, which for some reason inspired a fan to throw an object at Eilish during a show last week in Arizona — and a stunning “Happier Than Ever” before launching into “Birds of a Feather,” the siblings, ended the perversely breezy summer hit about longing for a love that lasts “until I rot, dead and buried / until I’m in the coffin you carry.”

It’s a typically dark image of Eilish, who has done as much as anyone to make pop a place to think about complicated ideas about mental health. Here, her arm happily wrapped around her brother, she sang it as if it were a lesson on how to be happy.