Album Review: 'Hit Me Hard and Soft' - Billie Eilish
With such a bold and evocative title, you’d expect dramatic flair in spades, filled with exhilarating highs and brutalising lows. But what we get is a lot of mixed emotions...
Three years ago. Billie Eilish was Happier Than Ever… or so it seemed.
On the follow-up to her behemoth debut, WHEN WE ALL FALL ASLEEP, WHERE DO WE GO?, the then-19 year old singer was already feeling weary and disillusioned with fame, almost seeming ready to quit altogether. ‘Things I once enjoyed just keep me employed now,’ she sang on the ghostly 'Getting Older.’
Despite rave reviews, the album left Eilish with an identity crisis, admitting, ‘I dyed my hair blond[e] and I immediately was like, ‘Oh, I have no idea who I am.’
Her brother and close collaborator FINNEAS, meanwhile, recalls the era as ‘difficult and confusing.’ ‘In a weird way, that was a little like being in a tornado cellar, reading a cute little story,’ he told Rolling Stone. ‘It was a coping mechanism of an album.’
Eilish’s latest album, HIT ME HARD AND SOFT, finds her still trying to make sense of life, love and fame. With such a bold and evocative title, you’d expect dramatic flair in spades, filled with exhilarating highs and brutalising lows. But what we get is a lot of mixed emotions...
‘People say I look happy/Just because I got skinny/But the old me is still me and maybe the real me/And I think she's pretty,’ she sweetly sings on the poignant opener, ‘SKINNY.’ It’s a stunning track, Eilish showcasing the same breathlessness in her voice that made the Oscar-winning ‘What Was I Made For?’ so aching and raw.
Before long, its flourishing strings soon melt into a fog of whirring synths, soon transitioning into the titillation of queer anthem, ‘LUNCH.’ ‘It’s a craving, not a crush,’ the singer coos, along with other come-ons, teasing her girl with expensive girls and inviting her to shower at her place. The groove is also sublime with its leery mix of grimy nu-disco and sleepy, brassy guitar tremors, later swallowed by a rubbery synth breakdown that adds to Eilish’s disorienting lust and excitement.
‘CHIHIRO’ (named after the young heroine from Studio Ghibli’s Spirited Away), meanwhile, recalls the brooding, club-inspired minimalism of Happier Than Ever’s ‘Oxytocin,’ easily the album’s best track as Eilish evokes the dark mischief of old with kinetic beats and a cool, limbre bassline.
Tracks like ‘WILDFLOWER’ and ‘THE GREATEST’ see the singer aim for the rich grandiosity of latter-day Del Rey, restlessly unfurling in a lush, hazy sprawl of guitars and drums. Both songs are tailor-made to fill stadiums, especially the latter with its crashing glam rock crescendo.
But at the same time, you can’t help but feel that they were made to add a couple of bombastic crowd-pleasers to Eilish’s repertoire; it’s no secret that the singer has been making the shift towards a more mainstream-friendly sound, seemingly taking note of the rock-tinged direction a lot of her peers are heading in at the moment. Even ‘BIRDS OF A FEATHER’ could qualify as such, a lush, nostalgic and willowy birdsong that falls somewhere between Beabadoobee and HAIM (Even Stereogum called it ‘The greatest Haim single that Haim had nothing to do with’).
Not that Eilish and brother FINNEAS spend much time exploring these sounds. The most glaring issue on this album is its serious lack of urgency and follow-through, the O’Connell sibling teasing some interesting ideas here and there but never really bothering to flesh them out.
‘L’AMOUR DE MA VIE’ starts as a slinky and snarky revenge ballad, a twinkle of menace in its eye (‘I was the love of your life/ But you were not mine’), but an abrupt shift into a generic club beat quickly kills the tension. ‘BITTERSUITE’ makes a detour far too early into a muzak-style salsa riff, making her romantic frustrations hard to take seriously, while THE DINER,’ (told from the point of view of a celebrity stalker) sounds cheap and chintzy, making a weak attempt to emulate the dark and kooky vibe of early Eilish hits like ‘Bellyache.’
The writing on HIT ME HARD AND SOFT is also lacking. On Happier Than Ever, Eilish opened up about sexism, the drudgery of fame, making lovers sign NDAs and power imbalances in the music industry. On here, the songs vaguely reference scandal, heartbreak and romance, filled with too many platitudes to feel truly meaningful. ‘But you should’ve seen it/The way it went down/ Wouldn’t believe it,’ she drawls on ‘L’AMOUR DE MA VIE’. About what exactly, I’m not quite sure.
And while the singer spoke openly and proudly to Rolling Stone about her queer identity, ‘LUNCH’ and ‘WILDFLOWER’ are the only songs on the album that make explicit reference to it. Eilish doesn’t owe us any Swiftian soul-baring on the subject, but it would’ve been nice to see her celebrate it more with as much reverence as she does on those two tracks, delivering queer pop bangers that would no doubt delight the LGBT+ side of the singer’s fanbase.
Refusing to preview any singles before its release, Eilish wanted Hit Me Hard and Soft to be more of an ‘album-ass album’ and to ‘make sense, but not just be a repeat and a clone of every other song.’
Yet the general tone is muddled and confused, drifting aimlessly between genres. Happier Than Ever might’ve seemed like a drag at times, but at least there was some inventiveness and variety, offering up an intriguing mix of jazz, RnB, electro pop and strings. Here, it feels like Eilish has given in to more conventional, more radio-pleasing impulses, stripping away the quirks and idiosyncrasies that made her first two records so memorable.
HIT ME HARD AND SOFT isn’t quite a flop, but it doesn’t hit anywhere near as hard as it should...