The night before speaking to this masthead, Billie Eilish faced her music.
Under strobe lights, on the smoke-covered court at Brooklyn’s Barclays Centre stadium, the 22-year-old pop prodigy played her highly anticipated new album, Hit Me Hard and Soft, to an eager crowd of fans, friends and family.
Pop superstar Billie Eilish is releasing a new album: Hit Me Hard and Soft.Credit: Petros Studio
“It was so embarrassing,” Eilish laughs. “I love performing so much and this wasn’t performing; this was me just standing there … I’m just like, ‘Here’s the album. I’m playing it. And I’m watching people hear it for the first time’. It was so scary and nerve-racking. I was weirdly embarrassed. I was like, ‘Ew, why is everyone listening to me?’”
Hit Me Hard and Soft is Eilish’s follow-up to 2021’s Happier Than Ever. Since then, she’s won two Academy Awards for best original song, and cemented her status as a defining artist of this generation. Her latest album, released on Friday, has already garnered widespread critical acclaim.
Alongside her on the court was her brother, Finneas O’Connell. He is by her side throughout the making of every song as her producer, on stage when she’s accepted Grammys and Oscars for those songs, and performing alongside her on tour.
The sole producer on Hit Me Hard and Soft, O’Connell told Rolling Stone recently that this is “an album-ass album.” The siblings have rejected the contemporary cultural climate, one where songs are stripped for parts to encourage TikTok virality, and created a record that requires deep, immersive listening.
Credit: Petros Studio
It’s an auteurist vision rendered in 10 tracks that weave and bleed into one another. As a listener, you encounter ideas early on that reappear later in new contexts, like ghosts. In crafting Hit Me Hard and Soft, Eilish looked even farther back.
“We brought back this song that we made when I was 14 and Finneas was 18 called True Blue. We brought it back and we changed it a bunch, but we kept the hook.”
They did the same with Born Blue, a song that didn’t find its place on Happier Than Ever, merging two fragments into Blue, the closing track. “I felt like it was two older versions of me mixed with the version of me now, all becoming one whole version,” she says. “That was really special.”
The album opens with Skinny. Eilish delivers the delicate, pained lines, “Am I acting my age now? / Am I already on the way out? / When I step off the stage, I’m a bird in a cage” over gentle finger-plucked guitars – and a whoosh of screams from a heaving, adoring crowd, like the ones she’ll encounter on tour next year. Tickets for the dozen dates on her Australian arena tour sold out instantly.
That clipped-wing imagery re-emerges on Blue. But this time her misery is pushed to the side as she reconsiders another’s: someone “born bluer than a butterfly”, given everything in the world (fame, attention) except what they needed (love, security, a good night’s sleep).
The final line – of the song and the album – is Eilish speaking over absolute silence: “But when can I hear the next one?” When the refrain is delivered by fans in DMs and comments sections daily, it’s easy to imagine the sentiment not as request but an endless demand for more, from an eternally insatiable public.
Eilish says, “such big, huge moments in [her] life” were happening over the course of making this record, that by January, when they finished it, she could barely recognise the person who first sat down to write it.
“When I look at a video of us making it … I can literally see me become myself. It doesn’t mean I wasn’t myself then, but I really feel like, throughout the making of this album, I really kind of found myself – maybe for the first time ever.”
Finneas O’Connell, left, and Billie Eilish accept the award for best original song for What Was I Made For? from Barbie.Credit: AP
The record overflows with ideas and rarely stays in the same place too long. It’s comparable to a television show, a limited series that changes narrative course in each episode, where a new chapter of a protagonist’s life can be explored in a handful of minutes and deemed finite by the closing credits.
L’Amour De Ma Vie – “love of my life” – takes a narrative and sonic detour partway through, segueing from swoony, lovesick jazz into something more hectic. The ceilings lower, the ambient lights cut out and the strobes flicker to life, as if moving on from heartbreak is as easy as raving. It’s one for fans of the title track on 2021’s Happier Than Ever, whose breakdown was so beloved Eilish released a cut-down edit of only the song’s second-half.
Hit Me Hard and Soft captures smooth edges and ones that leave a bruise. There are bangers and ballads in equal measure. It’s as gloomily insular as it is bright, cheeky and euphoric.
On The Greatest Eilish issues herself a sardonic pat on the back for dealing so well with a lover’s apathy.
“That’s one of my favourite songs on the album,” she says. Landing on its lyrics felt, she says, like finally finding the words to capture a feeling that had been evading her: “And then you’re like, ‘Oh, I really ate that!’”
“Also, making that song really opened a door to being honest, that I hadn’t really been letting happen. We finished the album after that … it just started flowing out of us super naturally.”
Eilish can’t put her finger on why she’d resisted that honesty earlier, except that “it’s hard to see what’s right in front of you; it’s much easier to see what’s way behind you,” she says.
The nature of being famous since your early teens is about looking back; this is an artist doomed – by her fans, by the endless loop of Vanity Fair’s annual interviews with her about her, by reviews and interviews and the very nature of celebrity – to revisit her past, answer for her teenage declarations, past decisions and recent creative choices. None of us could hold up to such scrutiny.
But on her latest work, she’s facing her present head-on.
“The thing that changed, I think, was me being like, let me take a step back and actually look at myself and see how I’m feeling,” she explains.
She gives her brother credit for helping in this area. “Why we’re able to create what we create is that Finneas sees me in a way I don’t really even see me,” Eilish says.
When they write together, he lobs difficult-to-swallow truths at her, which she resists before landing on acceptance: “I’m like, ‘Oh my god, that’s totally true. You see me and you can tell that that’s what I’m feeling, even if I’m not able to get to that’.”
Billie Eilish will be 23 at the end of this year. She began making music over a decade ago, and has now been famous for more than a third of her life. To tell us who she is at this moment, Eilish has to shut out the historical chatter and ignore the voices that claim to know her better than she knows herself, based on all that she’s done before.
This album is an attempt to do that, a kind of flag in the sand of her now and future. It feels fated that we’ll eventually look back on Hit Me Hard and Soft – and perhaps all of Eilish’s output – as testimonies of what fame does, feels like and shouldn’t be allowed to touch.
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