Billie Eilish Really Did Sample an Australian Pedestrian Crossing in 'bad guy' — Here's the Proof

Here's a sentence we never thought we'd type: one of the biggest pop songs of the last decade contains a sample of a Sydney pedestrian crossing. And this time, no hedging required — it's true, and Billie Eilish said so herself.

If you've spent any time at all walking around an Australian city, you know The Sound. It's that insistent, slightly unhinged clicking that kicks in when the little green man appears, there to tell vision-impaired pedestrians it's safe to cross. Tick-tick-tick-tick-tick, fast and urgent, like a geiger counter with somewhere to be. Most of us tune it out entirely. We've been conditioned since childhood to hear it as "walk now, don't dawdle" and nothing more.

But play that sound to an American, a Brit, or basically anyone who didn't grow up here, and you'll get a very different reaction. It's weird. It's loud. It sounds like a prop from a horror film about a haunted pedestrian crossing. Which is exactly why, back in 2019, a theory started doing the rounds that was almost too good to be true: that Billie Eilish and her brother/producer Finneas O'Connell had snuck the sound of an Australian crossing signal into the percussion of "bad guy" — the song that, with its sly "duh" and that now-legendary pulsing bassline, turned a teenager from Highland Park into the biggest new pop star on the planet.

"bad guy" is, by design, a song built out of things that are not instruments. Finneas has talked at length, in various interviews over the years, about how much of the "When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?" album was assembled from everyday found sounds recorded in a bedroom studio rather than anything you'd find on a session muso's rider. The crunchy low end on "bad guy" reportedly started life as a distorted bass tone pushed well past where any sane engineer would stop. Other tracks on the album are stitched together from things like a dentist's drill, a stapler and assorted bits of foley that Finneas bounced around and pitched down until they stopped sounding like themselves and started sounding like music. So when someone suggested "maybe that clicking sound is a sampled crossing signal," it didn't sound far-fetched at all. It sounded exactly like something these two would do.

Which is why the claim spread so fast through Australian entertainment and pop-culture outlets, who ran with versions of "Billie Eilish sampled a Sydney pedestrian crossing in bad guy" as a delighted, slightly incredulous bit of local trivia. We get it — it's a brilliant story. Our weird little beeping box, immortalised in a Grammy-sweeping global smash.

Image: Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Here's the part where a good debunking piece usually has to ruin everyone's fun by saying "actually, there's no proof." Not this time. Billie Eilish confirmed the whole thing herself, on the record, in a Rolling Stone interview where she and Finneas walked the magazine through the song's production piece by piece. Asked about the source of that percussive click, she described the exact moment: "My mom and I went for a walk in Sydney, we were like across the street from the hotel," she said. "The crosswalk was this little, like, you press it and it's like 'doop... doop'... and I was like, that's hard!" Finneas took the phone recording she'd made of it, chopped it up and sped it up, and built it straight into the beat — which means that click sitting under the vocal on one of the best-selling songs of 2019 is, genuinely, a pedestrian crossing from across the road from a Sydney hotel. You can watch her tell the story herself in Rolling Stone's video breakdown of how "bad guy" was made.

So, refreshingly, no clever-friend-ruins-the-story twist required here — this is the rare internet pop-culture claim that turns out to be exactly as good as advertised. An Australian pedestrian crossing, recorded on a phone on a tour stop, genuinely ended up as the rhythmic backbone of a song that would go on to sweep Record of the Year and Song of the Year at the Grammys. Somewhere, a council roads department has absolutely no idea it co-produced a Grammy winner.

While we're here, the crossing sound itself deserves its own moment in the spotlight — officially the PB/5 pedestrian signal, a proudly Australian bit of accessibility engineering that's been clicking away at intersections since the 1970s, loud and distinctive enough that it's been nominated for preservation by the National Film and Sound Archive as a genuine piece of our national soundscape. It really is one of those things you stop noticing as a local and can't stop noticing as a visitor — up there with magpies dive-bombing cyclists and servos selling garlic bread as a certified Australian experience nobody warns you about in advance.

There's something very fitting about it: a country that turned a humble road-safety beeper into an object of genuine curiosity, deliberately smuggled into a song about being a little bit of a menace — that tracks. We contain multitudes, and apparently some of them click.

Need some wonderful and wacky gifting of your own? Head over to quirksy.com.au for more quirky finds that are, we promise, every bit as real as that crossing sound.