Something snapped at the climax of “Happier Than Ever,” the title track from Billie Eilish's second 2021 album. Amid songs about the pitfalls of fame, excessive expectations and projections, and self-love, she also sang about heartbreak. And in the over-the-top finale, Billie Eilish, as her heroine Lana Del Rey would say, was left with nothing to give, effectively closing the door on her ex and finding a seismic way to close out the newest version of Billie Eilish. Connoisseur of eclectic pop.
The thing about heartbreak, though, is that you can crawl out of the darkest pits, find love again, lose it again, and be transported back to the depths of despair, all in the span of three or four years. This is the emotional backdrop of Hit me hard and soft, Billie Eilish's excellent third album. If the anguish felt bad Happier than everis crushing Hit me hard and soft.
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Released with no previous singles and relatively limited promotion for a pop star the size of Eilish, Hit me hard and soft This is not a surprise turn to the left but rather the consolidation of sound ideas addressed in Happier than ever. Eilish's groundbreaking sound from five years ago consisted of icy, hip-hop-inspired beats that she cooed in a mostly choppy, ASMR-style delivery. All of this is not difficult to remember and, in retrospect, seems remarkable.
Now, she still owns mastery of her softer record, but Hit me hard and soft demonstrates more aspects of Billie Eilish's voice than ever before. There are about three Finneas hip-hop-inspired beats, and the rest range from soft rock to deep house, from lush R&B to jazz indie rock. “Happier Than Ever” was just a tease; Eilish is rising more than once in Hit me hard and softevoking everyone from Hayley Williams to Solange.
The album follows a flexible narrative structure. “Skinny” continues where Happier than ever left it and sets the stage for hit me hardThe journey of: “I fell in love for the first time,” tenderly recounts over the softest electric guitar imaginable. In the first song alone, Eilish's guard is already down: “People say I look happy/Just 'cause I got skinny,” she says one line, and then she retreads ground from Happier than ever with “When I come off stage I'm a bird in a cage/I'm a dog in a kennel” and lamenting social media's hunger for “the baddest kind of humor.” But then, she hits a crystalline, soaring high note, followed by the most R&B-Billie Eilish version imaginable, closing the song with a weeping string section.
It's all fascinatingly intimate, and then comes “Lunch,” the beginning of Eilish's love story, driven almost exclusively by lust (“It's a craving, not a crush,” she sings). “Lunch,” with its driving beat, reedy guitars, and horny urgency, stands as Billie Eilish’s post-punk hit. Finneas's throaty bass intro at the end is so jarring that she jumps out of the speakers. She continues to chronicle the nervous early phases of a relationship in the absolutely beautiful “Chihiro,” which feels like a spiritual sequel to Happier than everIt's “NDA”. Aside from the very sapphic “Lunch,” “Chihiro” is one of the only times Eilish subtly references the social divide of a queer romance, and the murky lines that get crossed when a relationship becomes “serious.” But in these heartbroken love songs, gender is irrelevant.
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