HIT ME HARD AND SOFT: Billie Eilish Album Review
Written by Thomas Dent, edited by Millie Cain.
After a three year break, Billie Eilish has returned with her third, and best studio album. HIT
ME HARD AND SOFT finds Eilish in a much more mature and reflective mood than on her hit
and miss second record Happier Than Ever yet many of the same questions are posed by
Eilish on the low-key opening track ‘Skinny’ as she asks ‘Am I acting my age now? Am I
already on the way out? When I step off the stage, I’m a bird in a cage’. This song recalls the
lyrics of 2021s ‘Getting Older’ as she came to terms with her newfound megafame. With this
fame came insecurity and Billie stated in a recent interview that this album ‘is the most me
thing that I’ve ever made’ as well as explaining how this is the first album that has come
from a place of pure self-confidence.
Her assertation is evident on the second track ‘Lunch’ which concerns her complete infatuation,
and the track is a clear expression of Eilish’s sexual identity. On an album containing no released
singles this is the obvious choice. It was my most streamed song in May purely because of
how irresistibly catchy it is. Everything is a hook here, from the bassline to the chorus itself.
Billie has strayed into pure pop banger territory once again, even if this is one of the outliers
on an otherwise quietly reflective album.
The third track ‘Chihiro’ was one of the earliest songs written for the album with Billie
recently sharing a video from 2022 of her singing a near fully formed version. HIT ME HARD
AND SOFT owes a lot to Finneas, Billie’s producer, brother and creative partner. He has
taken his sisters musical ideas and made them complete entities on this album.
The elaborately layered synth lines of ‘Chihiro’ float around in their own ethereal space
while Billie’s barely audible cries fade in and out of contention for the attention of your ear.
The album is Finneas’ best effort as a producer to date and he also shows off his prowess on
the track ‘L’amour De Ma Vie’ which opens with a watery guitar figure and weaves its way
around Billie’s unapologetic lyrics all while Finneas is building an atmosphere with filters and
fluttering synths that climax to show a fully realized shared vision.
That vision was for this to be an ‘album album’, one with no singles that you could
completely immerse yourself in over one sitting. Billie said in an interview that ‘I don’t like
singles from albums. This album is like a family: I don’t want one kid in the room alone’. The
middle tracks on this album certainly live up to that billing – ‘Birds of a Feather’ is a classic
pop song that could’ve been released in any decade and will surely be the radio favourite
from this record.
‘Wildflower’ is a quiet acoustic number that could easily pass you by but with repeated
listens it slowly reveals itself as a wonderfully written piece of music and ‘The Greatest’ is
similar to ‘Happier than Ever’ in how it builds to a satisfying and cathartic conclusion.
The album begins its conclusion with another earworm. ‘The Diner’ opens with a saxophone
motif carried by the most typical ‘Billie Eilish beat’ on the album – this one could fit
comfortably on her debut album and is a conscious attempt to reclaim, in her words, ‘2019
Billie’. The song ends with a sinisterly read phone number that when called plays an
automated recording of Billie – almost like an absent voicemail.
The only song that I am not a fan of from this album is ‘Bittersuite’. As the penultimate track
it serves mainly to leads as a bridge to the closing ‘Blue’ and doesn’t really have anything
melodic of note to interest you like the other tracks do. Luckily this is a minor blip in the
world of HIT ME HARD AND SOFT and ‘Blue’, composed of two old song fragments acts as a
worthy self-referencing closer. A sort of end credits that take on a lullaby type quality to
accompany your journey out of the world of the album and back into yours.
Billie Eilish could be forgiven for thinking she’s already peaked (at the age of twenty two
she’s released three albums, headlined Glastonbury and won two Oscars for her Bond and
Barbie movie themes) yet HIT ME HARD AND SOFT shows that there are many more miles to go
in this sibling partnership. At a crossroads in her career, Eilish has delivered us a modern
classic that has laid the foundations for a decade or more of pop culture domination.
