In the three years since Billie Eilish’s sophomore album, 2021’s self-reflective, jazzy Happier Than Ever, the pop phenom hasn’t lost an ounce of cultural relevance. Thanks to her Grammy- and Oscar-winning song for last year’s Barbie soundtrack, the crushing ballad “What Was I Made For?,” the 22-year-old is as ubiquitous as ever, putting the hype for her new music at an all-time high. After she announced her third album last month—the curiously titled Hit Me Hard and Soft, to be released with no advance singles or videos—she revealed in an interview with Zane Lowe on Apple Music that she and her brother and longtime producer, Finneas, had “made an album without any or much thought of other people.” One couldn’t help but wonder if a surprising pivot was in store.
The resulting Hit Me Hard and Soft, however, largely returns to the menacing, sometimes theatrical palette of Eilish’s record-breaking debut. Swirling with midtempo beats, synthy mid-song breakdowns, and the occasional suite of strings from Attacca Quartet, the album doesn’t tread too far into new territory, instead settling into a brooding sweet spot that Eilish knows well. Here are five takeaways from the new album.
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Trying on New Vocal Styles
Billie Eilish has made a name for herself on a specific sound: murky beats, earworm melodies, and ominous, whispered vocals. She switches up the latter a bit more on Hit Me Hard and Soft, moving from clear, sugar-sweet vocals on the breezy pop confection “Birds of a Feather” to a pitch-shifted scream during the ecstatic, pinwheeling outro on “L’Amour de Ma Vie.” It’s fun to see Eilish flex her different vocal modes, lending depth to songs like “Bittersuite,” where she matches waves of swelling synths with jazzy vocal backing tracks.
A Looser, More Mature Billie Takes Shape
One of Hit Me Hard and Soft’s most memorable songs is the punchy synth-rock jaunt “Lunch,” where Eilish is up front about finding another woman so hot she could “eat that girl for lunch.” It’s a sleek, sly sex song that sounds like the most fun Eilish has had on record yet, fusing her earlier, playful sound with a more mature touch. She carries that blend of maturity and winking irreverence further on the narrative-driven “The Diner,” assuming the perspective of a stalker over a deranged funhouse beat. “Don’t be afraid of me/I’m what you need,” she sings in a quietly pleading tone, “I saw you on the screens/I know we’re meant to be.” Knowing Eilish herself has been the subject of a terrifying stalker’s fascination in real life adds a macabre undertone to the song’s already unnerving tale.
Beat Switches Aplenty
Finneas, the lone producer of Hit Me Hard and Soft, switches the sound a lot across the new album’s 10 tracks—often even changing styles in the same song. The waterlogged, reggae-inspired thump in the opening stretch of “Bittersuite,” for instance, falls away for a series of cresting synth freakouts. Elsewhere, the winding electric guitar that guides “Chihiro,” titled after the protagonist of Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away, moves at a midtempo clip before collapsing into a trancy finish. Eilish shapeshifts between genres and moods to keep listeners on their toes and, importantly, reflect the unpredictability of her own roving mind—by the time the nearly six-minute closing song, “Blue,” veers from stomping pop-rock to swooning piano ballad to ruptured hip-hop beats, you can fully grasp Eilish’s delightful unruliness at work.
Billie Can Still Knock Out a Ballad
Eilish has said that Hit Me Hard and Soft’s tender opening ballad, “Skinny,” was made as a way to break through a bout of writer’s block while trying to work out “What Was I Made For?” You can hear traces of it in her tender, featherlight vocal delivery, swaddled in fingerpicked guitar used to underscore discerning, heartbreaking lyrics on body image and celebrity. “Am I acting my age now? Am I already on the way out?” she asks, voice slipping into a falsetto to confront criticisms she’s faced her whole life in the public eye. It’s a track that confirms Eilish remains one of the best of her generation at crafting a ballad that can just pull the rug out from under you.
Memorable Lyrics:
- “People say I look happy/Just because I got skinny/But the old me is still me and maybe the real me/And I think she’s pretty” (“Skinny”)
- “You need a seat? I’ll volunteer/Now she’s smiling ear to ear/She’s the headlights, I’m the deer” (“Lunch”)
- “Can’t change the weather/Might not be forever/But if it’s forever/It’s even better” (“Birds of a Feather”)
- “You seem so paralyzed/It’s so romanticized/If this is how I die/That’s all right” (“Bittersuite”)
- “You were born bluer than a butterfly/Beautiful and so deprived of oxygen” (“Blue”)
