Loading ...
As a lifelong Billie Eilish fan, I was ready for her third album, HIT ME HARD AND SOFT, to be released. Before May 17 it had been nearly 3 years since her last album Happier Than Ever. After listening on repeat, I have decided that three years was worth the wait.
HIT ME HARD AND SOFT was produced and written by Eilish and her longtime collaborator, and brother, FINNEAS. The album is complete with 10 songs, and 43 minutes, being on the shorter side of modern pop albums. Eilish starts the album with “SKINNY”, a stripped-back guitar melody featuring wispy layered vocals with emotionally effective lyrics accompanied by an electric guitar. It is packed with lyrics touching on body image, her relationship with fame, and her relationship with herself- resembling Eilish’s 2023 hit song off the “Barbie” movie soundtrack, “What Was I Made For?” Eilish is picking up right where she left off. All of this raw emotion is demolished by the following song “LUNCH” which explores her sexuality with a catchy hook and crunchy destroyed bass guitar, a bass that is heard throughout the entire album.
Later in the album, Eilish put the years of “whisper singing” allegations to rest with the sixth song on the record, “THE GREATEST”. Around the 3:10 minute mark of the nearly 5-minute song, her soft voice erupts into a loud belt partnered with captivating drums and background vocals, similar to Billie’s 2021 Number 1 hit “HAPPIER THAN EVER”. In recent years, pop music has lacked the sense of live instrumentation on recorded music, resulting in somewhat boring-sounding radio songs. But Eilish and FINNEAS were able to make you feel as if you were in the room with them while recording the vocals and drums.
Not all of the songs fit the stereotypical “depressing” Billie Eilish songs that her fame was built off of, “L’AMOUR DE MA VIE” demonstrates just that. With the low-tempo guitar song, you may think you know what to expect, but at the 3:40 minute mark, an explosive synthesized beat comes in, followed by Eilish’s distorted vocals. This is a common theme in the album: Billie never lets you know what’s coming next. This tactic is used again on the closing song of the album “BLUE”, starting with a fan favorite unreleased hook from a recording session she did in 2014 that has circulated TikTok, by doing this expands the overall shock factor for the entirety of the album.
While listening to this album as a whole it is incredibly difficult to find direct musical influences, which is what makes Eilish and FINNEAS so genius. It is clear that while making this album there was a mission: make a cohesive album. They did just that. They were able to make each song live in its world. No song sounds like the next, which is what some of Eilish’s peers in the music industry have struggled with while making full albums. Eilish and FINNEAS were able to create a 10-song body of work that may be their best to date.
