“You do not want you know how lonely I've been,' sings Billie Eilish halfway through her gorgeous new album, Hit hard and soft. This sums up the paradox of her life in one line – a shy oddball who quickly became a mega-pop star, a romantic who never had the luxury of a private love life, a target of misogyny from her mid-teens. At 22, she has already renewed the way she experiences pop. But she has the power to have the whole world on her side even when she's fighting it.
Billie blew up at 17 with her blockbuster debut When we all fall asleep, where do we go?, her diary of chilling teenage nightmares, with brother/co-conspirator Finneas O'Connell. But after 5 years at the top, she still has the wacky edge she brought to her music when she was just a kid messing around with bedroom pop for kicks and giggles. As he sings on opener “Skinny,” “The old me is still me and maybe the real me.”
It's been three years since her last album, the ultra-angry catharsis Happier than ever. The new album is very different – more playful, more pissed off. The music ranges from plaintive synth-pop like “Birds of a Feather” or “Blue” to confessional ballads like “The Greatest” or “Skinny”. But even in a big pop year that was already a pretty big cluster-bunch of bold statements for mega-pop queens, Hit hard and soft stands out as something uniquely strange.
Fame still feels like a trap for Eilish—she sings about feeling “like a bird in a cage” on both the first and last songs here. Hit hard and soft it's her coming-of-age album, but also her coming-out album, with a non-stop rush of emotional and musical rapid changes. He moves from depression, isolation and misery to the clear electro-gothic lust of 'Lunch', where a muse that is 'wrong, not broken' breaks out. It's the evil of “Bad Guy,” only now he screams, “You need a seat, I'm volunteering/Now she's grinning ear to ear/She's in the headlights, I'm the deer.”
“Skinny” is an intense opener that picks up where Happier than ever stopped, but with the same vulnerable intimacy of the heartbreaking Barbie ballad, “What Was I Made For?” The lyrics allude to body image trauma as well as a relationship destroyed by public scrutiny – as she sings, “The internet is thirsty for the worst kind of joke and someone has to feed it.”
Almost all of the sounds here were made by Eilish and O'Connell, although his strings are played by the Attaca Quartet, a rare moment where outsiders are invited into the brother's private sound world. It's a tight, linear album, at an old-school pace of 10 songs in 44 minutes, none particularly opaque or inscrutable, but often warping halfway through into a completely different song. The title 'Bittersuite' sums up the flow of the album, with songs often shifting halfway through and ending up on a completely different song. “L'Amour de la Vie” begins as an Edith Piaf coffee ballad, then turns into a high-energy disco. “Bittersuite” itself begins on the track, suddenly slows down, and then ends with a morbid synth drone, like a soundtrack to the death of HAL 9000.
“Birds of a Feather” is a soulful eighties-flavored love song that could pass for vintage Sade or George Michael, with her more emotionally ravenous vocals. “I want you to tell me until I'm in the grave,” she pleads. “Till I rot dead and buried/ Till I'm in the coffin you carry.” But the strongest song here is “The Greatest,” where she goes from a whisper to a scream as she bears witness to the heartache of adulthood, almost growling, “All the times I've waited/For you to want me naked/I've done it all to appear painless.”
Three years ago, on Happier than ever, one of her most vulnerable moments came on “My Future,” where Eilish sang, “I'm in love with my future/Can't meet her.” Her future self has turned out to be quite the project – everything 19-year-old Billie could have hoped for. Hit hard and soft makes you marvel at how far he has traveled as a pop artist. But it's also a favorable omen that the older Billie is yet to come.
from our partners at https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-album-reviews/billie-eilish-hit-me-hard-and-soft-review-1235022854/