Hit Me Hard and Soft: Billie Eilish Grown Up

Billie Eilish has released three studio albums. The first, When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? (2019), made her a generational pop figure at 17. The second, Happier Than Ever (2021), was the transitional record, the one where the teen-pop horror aesthetic gave way to a more adult songwriter’s palette. Hit Me Hard and Soft, which arrived in May, is the record where the transition is complete.

This is her best album. I am going to try to say why.

What the album refuses

The commercial pressure on Eilish at this career stage is obvious: make another When We All Fall Asleep. Give the streaming algorithm another “Bad Guy.” Consolidate the teen-pop audience. Extend the franchise.

Eilish and her brother-collaborator Finneas O’Connell have done the opposite. Hit Me Hard and Soft is 10 songs, 43 minutes, sequenced as a continuous listen, with no obvious streaming-optimised singles. The opener, “Skinny,” is a five-minute acoustic song with minimal production. The closer, “Blue,” is a six-minute ambient-leaning epic built from samples of previous Eilish songs. The middle of the record includes “Birds of a Feather,” a straightforward pop-folk love song that became a hit because it could not not be a hit, not because it was structured to be one.

The album is a record in the old sense: a sequenced, thematically-coherent collection of songs intended to be consumed as a whole. That structure is, in the streaming economy, both commercially risky and artistically rare. Eilish has the career position to take the risk and has taken it.

The central track

“Lunch,” the second song on the record, is the single that will do the commercial work, and it deserves to. It is a specifically queer song (Eilish came out publicly in the album press cycle around this release) that is unusual in its register: plainspoken, sexually direct, uninterested in metaphor, structurally simple. Eilish delivers the lyric with a specific late-adolescent flatness that reads as both confident and slightly unsettled. The song is a small masterpiece of pop craft.

The more interesting tracks, for me, are in the album’s quieter middle. “Wildflower” is a specifically-structured song about inheriting an ex’s former partner, a relationship-dynamic pop music does not usually have the patience to examine. “Chihiro,” named after the Miyazaki protagonist, is the album’s most production-forward piece, a specifically hypnagogic arrangement that builds and releases over five minutes.

“The Greatest” is the album’s most direct pop song and also the one where Eilish’s vocal range is most impressively deployed. Her voice, which began her career as a specifically whispered intimate instrument, has developed into a more conventional pop-soul register, and “The Greatest” shows what she can do with it.

The Finneas contribution

I want to say something, at this point, about Finneas O’Connell, Eilish’s brother and producer, and the specific production sensibility he brings to her records. Finneas is, at this stage, one of the most important pop producers of his generation. His sound is built around specific restraints: a narrow palette of synthesizers, careful use of negative space, a willingness to let Eilish’s voice be the loudest element in the mix.

On Hit Me Hard and Soft, Finneas has expanded the palette in specific, deliberate ways. There is more acoustic guitar. There is more piano. There is more orchestration, particularly in the string arrangements on “Chihiro” and “Blue.” The expansion is never ostentatious. It reads as a producer who has been refining a palette for three records and has now earned the right to deploy it at larger scale.

The sibling collaboration, which has been a constant throughout Eilish’s career, has evolved into something like a specific production-artist partnership that is, at this point, one of the three or four most interesting ongoing artist-producer collaborations in contemporary pop music (Swift/Antonoff, Swift/Dessner, Beyoncé/various, Eilish/Finneas).

What the album is about

Hit Me Hard and Soft is, thematically, about the specific experience of being in your early twenties and discovering that early-twenties sexuality is different from adolescent sexuality in ways that are both liberating and disorienting. It is about identity-formation after fame. It is about relationships that end badly, then restart, then end again. It is about the specific strangeness of being a public person whose private self is both public and, simultaneously, opaque.

These are, broadly, the themes of third albums by pop artists who arrived young. The specific cohort Eilish belongs to, arriving at pop stardom in the algorithmic-streaming era, is still working out what a third album can be under these conditions. Eilish’s version is, so far, the most formally disciplined response.

Where the album wobbles

I will register one complaint. “L’amour de ma vie,” the sixth song, contains a stylistic pivot halfway through from a specifically jazz-ballad register to a specifically electro-pop register. The pivot is intentional and the song has been explicitly defended by Eilish and Finneas as a unified piece. On repeated listens, I am not convinced. The second half is a worse song than the first half. The pivot reads as an editorial compromise rather than as a formal choice.

This is a small complaint on a 10-track album that otherwise coheres. It is the one track I routinely skip on repeat listens.

What it signals

Eilish is now 22 and has produced three excellent albums across a five-year run. Her career trajectory, commercially and artistically, is as stable as any contemporary pop artist’s. The question is what she does next.

I hope she goes stranger. The specific artistic risks on Hit Me Hard and Soft, the length of some tracks, the willingness to sequence for continuous listening, the refusal of obvious singles, suggest that she is interested in making records that do not primarily serve the streaming economy. If she has the career position to continue in that direction, she should.

Put the record on from start to finish. No shuffle. “Skinny” through “Blue,” in sequence. It is the way the album was written.