“I think I am a songwriter first, which is always how I’ve felt about myself,” FINNEAS tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. The 27-year-old has already made his name as a producer through his chart-dominating, award-accruing work with his sister Billie Eilish. But when he was finished with his workload for 2023, which included working on Eilish’s blockbuster album HIT ME HARD AND SOFT and scoring the Apple TV+ show Disclaimer, he wanted to, as he put it, “dive back into my stuff”. So he went to work in a new space—a studio outside his home laboratory—surrounded by musicians with whom he felt comfortable feeling out new material, flexing his muscles as a producer while also testing out his songwriting chops. That collaborative ease is audible on For Cryin’ Out Loud!, an inviting album that combines soft rock’s slickness and indie’s choppy guitars with unexpected twists like the jittery epilogue to the chilled-out sophisti-pop flirtation “Sweet Cherries” or the brass that rises up at the end of the hooky, longing title track. FINNEAS’ songwriting strengths shine throughout, with his keen knowledge of how pop songs work shining alongside modern touches, as well as lyrics that channel their strong sentiments through fleeting imagery. The album’s emotional peak arrives on “Family Feud”, a story told through snapshots of moments when a brother-sister link grew stronger. Written 10 days after Eilish and FINNEAS won their second Academy Award for the Barbie ballad “What Was I Made For?”, “Family Feud” came from FINNEAS winding down from the siblings’ high-energy 2024 awards season by, he says, “thinking about my relationship with her, devoid of all of the other stuff”. It’s delicately put together, allowing for FINNEAS’ quiet rumination on how his bond with his sister feels as unbreakable as it did before fame swooped in to be gently placed at the forefront.