Songfacts®:

• You know those frustrating phone calls when someone is mad at you and is shouting, but you can't hear what they're saying because of the din in the background? This delicate, moody track is about one of those scenarios:
  
  Don't you know too much already?
  I'll only hurt you if you let me
  Call me friend, but keep me closer
  And I'll call you when the party's over
  
  Eilish is musing on the frustrations of the end of a relationship when her lover is trying to communicate something to her, but she just doesn't want to hear his voice at this juncture. She told Coup de Main: "I feel like everybody's had that struggle with someone – somebody on the phone yelling for some reason, and you're just like, 'You know what? F---ing leave me alone.'"
• Eilish first performed "When The Party's Over" live during her January 30, 2018 gig at The Tuning Fork in Auckland, New Zealand. The teenage singer then hooked up with her brother and frequent collaborator, Finneas O'Connell, for the angelic hum-laced production. He admitted it was a difficult track to record, but "hundreds and hundreds of vocal layers later," the siblings were happy with the final result.
• The video shows black tears flowing down Eilish's cheek, staining her outfit and later the floor. Eilish told NME that her inspiration for the clip came from a fan's drawing of her with black eyes leaking.
  
  “I remember standing there, looking at this drawing of me, and my eyes were black and there was black ink dripping from my eyes, and I just stared at it and I feel like I got star-struck by this image, this drawing of me," she said.
• The gloopy black substance used in the video was Xanthan gum mixed with charcoal water. To achieve the required thickness Eilish had to take about four swallows.
• Eilish and Finneas performed this at the Grammy Awards in 2020. They were big winners, taking Record of the Year and Song of the Year for "Bad Guy," and winning Album of the Year for When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?
• Disguised in a sun costume, LeAnn Rimes sang an a cappella version of this before she was revealed as the season 4 winner of The Masked Singer in 2020. Rimes spoke with Entertainment Weekly about the performance. "It's such a beautiful song," she said. "And for me, I loved having a different take on it, obviously, with the intimacy of it being just so bare - and I was so specific about that. I really, really wanted to do as much of that as possible with the a cappella. It's such an interesting TV moment because usually a cappella is not the way to go, you usually want to do this big dramatic thing, which it ended up that way [at the end of the song], but I really fought for that. I really wanted the intimacy of that, because I know how powerful that can be. When I saw it, I thought it turned out exactly like I wanted it to. People connected to it so deeply, and it was a powerful moment. So thank you for saying that. You're not the first and I'm taking it all to heart for sure."
• "When the Party's Over" plays during Season 3, Episode 7 of the Amazon Prime Video animated series Invincible. It plays in an emotional scene following Rex Splode's death.