Both soft focus and strobe lit, Billie Eilish’s third album finds the former teen prodigy, now 22, possibly hedging her bets for what might be the first time. She has built a mainstream pop career as an outsider auteur; Lana Del Rey, but for green-haired feminist insomniacs. For her 2019 debut, When We All Fall Asleep Where Do We Go, Eilish unleashed a creepy circus of teenage nightmares, polemically – for some – clad in loose-fit hip-hop garb.
Round two, Happier Than Ever (2021), dived deep into old-timey heartbreak, male toxicity and body positivity, with Eilish channelling vintage starlet vibes with pointed irony. As the title suggests, Hit Me Hard and Soft is a combo platter, one that draws on signature elements of her previous works – the haunted earworms of the first album, the heady swoon of the second; it packs in epic crescendos and whispery restraint.
There’s room, too, for the sophistication of Eilish’s Bond theme, No Time to Die – a string section, the Attacca Quartet, features – and the pensiveness of her 2023 Oscar-winning Barbie-doll identity crisis, What Was I Made For? Musically, Hit Me Hard and Soft does break new ground – as you would hope from Eilish and her producer brother, Finneas, two of pop’s great contemporary innovators. But it does so with less glee than previously.
Last year was supposed to be a quieter one for Eilish. Instead, the runaway success of Barbie and What Was I Made For? generated its own gravitational force, prompting a surfeit of media activity and a few more awards to add to her heaving mantelpiece.
Skinny, this album’s opener, feels like part two of What Was I Made For?, pondering Eilish’s own existential unease. She has fallen in love. People think she’s happy because she’s lost weight. “And I still cry,” she sings. “The old me is still me, and may be the real me, and I think she’s pretty.” It’s as though a single crystalline tear were falling down Eilish’s peachy cheek, clapping back to the retro sadness of Happier Than Ever even as the singer mourns her first-album self.
In a November 2023 interview with Variety, however, Eilish came out, quite matter-of-factly, as a lover of women as well as men. It should not have been a seismic event. It tilted the internet on its axis a little nonetheless. Her sexuality powers one of Hit Me Hard and Soft’s best tracks, Lunch: a Sapphic synth-pop banger in which Eilish smacks her lips, wanting to devour someone tasty. Even better, towards the end of the song, the Eilish siblings pull out some of their most dancefloor-facing music to date. It ends too soon, on some panting.
Later, on a track called L’amour De Ma Vie (French for “love of my life”), the same thing happens. The song delivers a relationship autopsy as retro easy listening. Then suddenly, Eilish’s voice is run through an effects unit. “And you moved on,” she chants, as club beats and a glacial synth line announce an unexpected 80s-meets-hyper-pop coda. It also ends too early.
These dancefloor incursions feel like the next sound frontier for Eilish, a horizon that Hit Me Hard and Soft stops travelling towards almost as soon as it spies it. Similarly, Bittersuite starts with the unexpected blare of a vintage synth, just one of a few Daft Punk-ish moments here. The rest of this low-key track, one of the album’s biggest growers, plays out as a spacious, almost dub take on Eilish’s sonic signatures, like an expanse of elegant gooseflesh. Once again, the outro is terrific; a road not taken far enough.
That’s not to say the remainder of the album is sub-par: Eilish has set a high bar, twice, and tracks that meander past the first time can often reveal themselves as bops on repeated plays – like the cool, throbbing R&B of Chihiro, named for the protagonist of Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away.
Anyone missing first-album Billie will thrill to The Diner, a feast of sinister fairground sounds where Eilish takes on the role of a stalker and whispers a phone number at the end, as though winking at her old penchant for barely singing audibly. It feels playful but at the same time unsettling, given her experiences – she has taken out restraining orders against more than one individual.
Getting together, and falling apart, are abiding themes on a record about love, which Eilish explores with growing sensitivity. But there are no culture-warping gauntlets thrown down in the manner of 2021’s Not My Responsibility, which Medusa-stared back at the male gaze. And if it weren’t for a subtle death wish running through Birds of a Feather and a giant mosquito-like solo at the end, you might mistake it for someone else’s work.
Hit Me Hard and Soft clearly wants to make a virtue of its subtlety, a strategy that Eilish gets away with, due to the chef’s kiss production work and her lyrical zingers. (“And the internet is hungry for the meanest kind of funny/ And somebody’s gotta feed it,” she sighs on Skinny.) But it would have been fun to hear this album’s “hard” edit – to witness the Eilishes upend rave music and double down on analogue keyboards, just as they have revolutionised pop’s palette, twice. The problem here is not a lack of cohesion between hard and soft – chiaroscuro is a great shade – but the knowledge that Eilish, not lacking in courage, might have hit even harder.
