Billie Eilish has described her new album Hit Me Hard and Soft as “the most genuine thing” she’s ever made.
During an appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert on Tuesday night, the 22-year-old singer described her third studio album as her most authentic music release so far.
“I think that with Hit Me Hard and Soft it’s like the first time since I’ve been an adult and maybe ever in my kind of creative life… it truly is the most genuine thing I’ve ever made,” she gushed.
“It feels very, very me and it feels like all of the music is exactly who I am, all the visuals are exactly who I am and that’s honestly terrifying and that’s why I’m literally shaking right now.”
The Bad Guy hitmaker went on to explain that she felt pigeonholed after the release of her first album, When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?, so she overcompensated for this on her 2021 album Happier Than Ever.
“It was almost like a reaction of, ‘You can’t tell me what to do! I’m gonna do whatever I want to do and here it is!’ And I think I may have gone a little… I really wanted to prove a point and so I think I went so far, but that’s kind of what I needed to do,” she added. “I needed to play this whole thing of, ‘I’m not what you think I am.'”
She noted that her sophomore album felt “very me” at the time, but she has come to realise that she was trying to prove to the world that she was multi-faceted and had more to offer.
Hit Me Hard and Soft was released on Friday.
