Candid, experimental and lucidly conceived, Hit Me Hard and Soft welcomes in a new era of Billie – a young artist in touch with her roots, but ever more willing to venture into new musical terrain.
By David Bayne-Jardine
Modern music consumption is becoming more and more short-lived. It is often the case that a few lines from a song go viral, soundtracking a new trend, only for the rest of the song, album, or artist’s work to remain relatively untapped. This is why Billie Eilish refused to release a single from her third studio album in advance. Hit Me Hard and Soft (2024) is designed to be listened to in one sitting; confident yet vulnerable, it calls for a return to the lost practice of album listening. Resisting staying in any place for too long, it is a stylistic rollercoaster that weaves between genres mid-song, and blurs the boundary between a track’s start and end. At times ecstatic and at others mellow, HMHAS marks a return to her roots in urban emo pop, but breaks into new musical territory in method and topic alike.
Eilish’s music has always drawn us close, both emotionally and physically. Launched into international fame at just 17 with her first album, When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?, addressing personal and taboo subjects with a rawness and realism has come to characterise her music. Physically, her breathy vocals create a distinctly personal relationship with the listener, and in the first track of HMHAS we are greeted once again with music that is questioning and open. A sequel song to her Grammy-winning ‘What Was I Made For?’, in ‘Skinny’ Eilish reflects on her life in the spotlight, as she struggles to grasp just who she is in a world adamant to define her by her recent weight-loss or queer sexuality. An enchanting, stripped-down guitar and bass line, topped off with light and vulnerable vocals is followed by the crooning, cinematic strings of the outro – a new experimental feature in Eilish and her brother FINNEAS’s music production.
But in the first about-turn of the album, as the tenderness of ‘Skinny’ ends, so begins the driving, grungy sound of ‘Lunch’ – a track that gloriously celebrates her newly-discovered queer attraction in the heavy electronic style of her earliest music. Eilish’s coming out was not without some commotion, as the artist famously called out Variety for caring too much about her sexuality and not enough about her art. Her admittance that she’s ‘attracted to them [women] for real’ became the focus of many magazine articles, including that of Variety, despite having expressed her frustration at the media’s obsession with her sexuality numerous times before. In this song, for the first time, Eilish addresses her attraction to women confidently and openly. Her breath, sensitive and emotional in the album’s first track, becomes sultry and passionate in this song, combining seamlessly with sections of spoken word.
So it seems that contrast lies at the heart of HMHAS, from the impossibility of the title’s demand to the quick-shifting genre changes that define the album. Light/dark play runs through ‘Birds of a Feather’, with its bouncy indie pop but morbidly obsessive lyrics. Safely describable as the most palatable song of the album, this fourth track is a head-bopping, smile-inducing, coming-of-age love song (it’s no surprise it features in the new season trailer for Netflix’s hit teen romance Heartstopper). Yet, in true Eilish style, the lyrics overlying the playful backing track speak in a darker tone – ‘I want you to stay/’Til I rot away, dead and buried/’Til I’m in the casket you carry’. Airy, light vocals transform into an impressive belting range in the later choruses – a technique with which she had experimented in her second album, Happier Than Ever, and with which she engages full-throttle in this, her third. In ‘The Greatest’, for example, the ascending vocal line climaxes into an immense belt of frustration and anger, before falling into an unexpected but powerful modulation. Eilish riffs in her upper range as the instrumental line marks out a more unconventional and experimental rhythm, where each bar of 8/8 is beat in groups of 3, 3, and 2. This head-bopping, heavy rock feel, aptly shows off the mastery of Eilish and FINNEAS’s writing and production.
It’s no coincidence that HMHAS seems much closer to the emo-rock style of her first album than that of her second. In her Rolling Stone Cover Story, Eilish expresses her desire to return to her electronic roots in HMHAS, describing her previous album’s more acoustic feel as a product of Covid and its restrictions – a time when she felt more out of touch with who she was. In HMHAS, Eilish revisits the topics and features of her first album, but this time with a sound that is more refined, mature and experienced. ‘Chihiro’ is like a more grown-up version of ‘bellyache’ with its punchy, sub-terranean bassline. ‘The Diner’ emulates earlier tracks like ‘Therefore I am’ with its immensely heavy downbeat. ‘Bad Guy’ is somewhat reborn in the bass-driven nature of ‘Lunch’. Whilst Happier Than Ever was refreshing because of its experimentation with a lighter, more instrumental feel, in HMHAS Billie turns back to the urban, technological music that first brought her to fame.
And techno is what we get in ‘L’amour de ma Vie’ – the sixth and perhaps best track of her new album. The song opens with a rich, jazz-infused ballad sound, but is soon cut short in a mid-song transition that flings us into the incandescent, electronic world of the 1980s. A four-on-the-floor beat morphs into a driving techno line, accompanied by reverberating synth descants and heavily-processed vocals that tell of her liberation post-break-up. The juxtaposition characterising this song is as exhilarating as it is unorthodox, and occurs several times across the shapeshifting album. For example, reversely, in ‘Bittersuite’, synthy techno transforms into a lighter waltz, before moving seamlessly back into grungy electropop. A third transition occurs between the end of this song and the start of the final one, ‘Blue’, in which the oscillating synth line of ‘Bittersuite’ is reborn into a vocal melody. ‘Blue’ is very much a conclusion to the entire album, with the orchestral lines from the opening track returning to accompany Eilish, who reflects on the experience of her turbulent relationship. Another mid-song shift in style occurs for a final time, as Eilish admits the sympathy she has for her ex-lover, who, despite hurting her, has had their own struggles too.
These elegant transitions across, and within, songs are testimony to the importance of listening to Hit Me Hard and Soft in its entirety, in order. In an era where music consumption is becoming increasingly momentary, where songs are TikTok-ified into short soundbites that come to define an artist’s work, HMHAS resists conforming to traditional album structures – it is very much a musical experience.