Billie Eilish’s New Album Is a Landmark, Whether She Wants It to Be or Not
Plumbing the dregs of her own adolescent subconscious for both amusement-park horror and the real sort, Billie Eilish aptly titled her 2019 debut album When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? In 2021, she sardonically named her follow-up Happier Than Ever, but she might as easily have called it When We Become Superstars, Where Do We Go? In an overwhelmed tone, it expressed the identity crisis brought on by sudden fame and others’ attempts to exploit it. Now, with her third album, Hit Me Hard and Soft, the question has shifted again—perhaps, as she sings on opening track “Skinny,” to Am I Acting My Age Now?
Hard and Soft is a more adult work, but not in the somewhat forced and retro way of the Hollywood-scale ballads on the previous record. That stylistic shift may have led to her and her constant collaborator, her brother Finneas, earning two Oscars for film songs in the past couple of years (for Barbie and the last James Bond flick), but it left behind a lot of what had made Eilish such an arrestingly new presence in pop music. Hard and Soft gets back to human scale by zooming in on the sexual and emotional intensities that are all-consuming in most people’s early 20s. (As Eilish sighs on “Skinny,” “21 took a lifetime.”) The songs may still be uncomfortable in places, but Eilish now sounds quite comfortable with that.
At times a little too comfortable. A couple of the songs in the middle lean to the generic: “Birds of a Feather” is a tuneful love song with an earwormy hook (which kept reminding me of other songs, like that 1999 cozy pullover of a hit, “Kiss Me”), but it’s scant on Eilish’s singular personality. Almost anyone could be singing it. Right before that comes “Chihiro,” an elegant piece of composition and production on Finneas’ part, but with only a gossamer sketch of a song within it, to my ears a forgettable cloud of low-stakes phrases reportedly inspired by the lead character of Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away.
Thankfully things get more vivid in the back half, after the pivot point of “The Greatest,” a self-deprecatingly caustic dramatic monologue about being too accommodating to an underappreciative lover, which breaks into full “Total Eclipse of the Heart”–sized, Jim Steinman–esque bombast in its final minutes. From there on, it feels like anything goes, with often multipart song structures, varied vocal techniques, and Eilish’s recovering bilious sense of humor set loose to follow the creators’ wilder whims. The closing tracks “Bittersuite” and “Blue” actually function as two linked phases of one long suite, comprising many mini-modules that often recapitulate musical and lyrical motifs from earlier on the album. That’s part of the way Hard and Soft winds up conveying both range and unity in its concise 45 minutes, in contrast with the sprawl of both Taylor Swift’s and Beyoncé’s 2024 albums—though it doesn’t have their conceptual ambition either, probably wisely.
We can’t overlook, however, that first comes the album’s raunchy highlight, the lead single “Lunch.” Last year, Eilish made headlines by acknowledging that she likes both “boys and girls,” a coming-out she’s said she regretted somewhat as an unplanned response to a journalist. Her forthright personality is often at odds with her desire not to cater to the “unfair” way “the internet bullies you into talking about who you are and what you are.” Online fandoms and much of the press have been habituated by Swift, Olivia Rodrigo, and others into pulling songs apart for personal detail, connecting pushpins on musical maps to individuals in the real world. Nonetheless, that particular revelation made room for Eilish to create this shameless ode to same-sex sensuality, with lines like “she dances on my tongue” and “you need a seat? I’ll volunteer.” It’s by far the catchiest song on the album—the only time here the siblings sound like they care much about crafting a bop—and as such it also throws down a gauntlet to radio: You want a Billie Eilish hit? Then you’ll have to play this gay one. In the context of the album, it also means that every time she sings about a person she desires, the listener is led to imagine a woman as easily as a man (the pronouns are often left ambiguous).
The pop spectrum has never been as brightly rainbow-streaked as it is today, of course, with queer love and lust songs making the charts by everyone from Troye Sivan to Boygenius to Lil Nas X to Chappell Roan and many more. But say what you will about a “Sapphic pop boom,” there’s never been an album by a woman so mainstream in pop, especially pop with a broad teen and tween audience, as Billie Eilish. Your Tegans and Saras simply can’t compare in scale—you’d have to think back to Melissa Etheridge, perhaps, and she was far more coy about it at her peak. Eilish’s title Hit Me Hard and Soft may come from a synthesizer preset, and Eilish has said she likes it for the paradoxical demand it makes, but it also can be read as playing with the sexual connotations and gendered associations of “hard” and “soft.” At the same time, the album also feels like the furthest thing from a self-conscious “statement” about sexuality—it’s remarkable in part for how matter-of-fact it is about the issue, unlike the demonstrative strivings of, say, Jojo Siwa—but that doesn’t make it any less of a landmark.
The video for “Lunch,” with Eilish back in the baggy hip-hop gear that she favored early on (now complete with a diamond grill), not only recalls 1990s videos like the ones Spike Jonze made with the Beastie Boys, but it also reminds me that when she debuted, part of what stood out as fresh about Eilish was that she wore her contemporary hip-hop influences boldly and casually, without it seeming awkward and interloping. She could be unself-conscious about that as a California teen, but as she’s developed, she’s understandably eased off that aspect of her style. Returning to it here might partly be to prompt people to compare “Lunch” to the level of sexual explicitness in many rap lyrics—in a world where “WAP” can be a No. 1 hit, “Lunch” is pretty mild stuff, unless you’re upset that it’s not about hetero sex.
The other callback to her 2019 style on Hard and Soft is a track called “The Diner,” which is musically very much in the creeping-and-bobbing, horror-synth mode common on When We All Fall Asleep. But here the threat isn’t the imaginary monster under the bed but the stalker outside the window, a nightmare Eilish has experienced repeatedly in real life. The horror fan (or Eminem fan) in her makes her bold enough to sing it from the stalker’s point of view, a Ripley-like maneuver that heightens suspense and slows down the time it takes for it to dawn on the listener how sinister the scenario is.
That repurposing is part of the way in which Hard and Soft feels like an album on which Eilish and Finneas are regathering their senses after some whirlwind years and tentatively finding ways forward. It may always disappoint some of us that they can’t recreate the subversive impact of her precocious debut. But some tricks really can’t be repeated from a different starting position. Eilish is indisputably rediscovering herself and expanding the sorts of songs she can write—arguably, even a standard-issue love song is fairly new to her repertoire. Meanwhile, Finneas is making multiple breakthroughs here, in the subtlety of his productions and the rhythms and textures he explores, including electronic dance styles he hasn’t flirted with before. As the background member of the duo, he’s under less pressure than his sister, and he takes advantage of that freedom here. He also, for the first time, incorporates a handful of guest musicians, with Andrew Marshall sitting in on drums and the Attacca Quartet playing string parts (orchestrated by Finneas and David Campbell, aka Beck’s dad).
On the evidence here, Eilish doesn’t seem at all desperate to churn out hits, with the deliberately tricky exception of “Lunch.” Given what she’s said on the matter in both interviews and songs, no doubt she feels she’s more than famous enough; even a little drop-off in popularity might be fine. That attitude alone makes her seem more mature than some older artists at her level of the biz. Eilish teases fans’ impatience here with the spoken snippet at the end of the album, “But when can I hear the next one?” Some of them theorize, because that’s what fans do, that it means there’s more music coming soon. Personally, I hope the duo keeps taking their time, so their releases keep feeling like pencil marks rising up a doorframe over the course of many years. Eilish may always stand 5-foot-3, but she has the makings of a giant.
