Billie Eilish: Hit Me Hard and Soft review – more soft than hard

A compelling tale of love and loss, Hit Me Hard and Soft sees Eilish embrace her sexuality on her own terms via knotty and unpredictable pop. The love songs are delectable and the showpiece moments titanic, although not every sonic experiment comes off.

There’s something admirable in the way Eilish casts aside any hint of lyrical subtlety in Lunch, the second track of her hotly anticipated third studio album, Hit Me Hard And Soft. “You need a seat, I’ll volunteer,” is one of the song’s many innuendos that will have no doubt raised an eyebrow when Eilish first presented it to her long-time producer and brother Finneas O’Connell. Eilish has long been known for resisting the sexualisation of young female pop stars that music executives seem to demand, gaining fame for her concealingly baggy oversized outfits. Her song Not My Responsibility, one of many Eilish tracks discussing body image, was an eerie spoken word piece about the demands of ogling magazines and relentless commentators. She was furious last year when Variety outed her as bisexual in a cover story, disappointingly still deemed a newsworthy reveal even in 2024. In Eilish’s words: “I like boys and girls leave me alone about it please literally who cares.”

For that reason, Lunch is a triumphant reclaiming of the narrative – Eilish’s first song explicitly about sex, and one not coy about mentioning the lover in question happens to be a girl. But beneath all the titillating euphemisms (“I could eat that girl for lunch”), there’s plenty of the singer’s trademark lyrical depth. The metaphor of eating has deep, dark connotations for Eilish and many of her young female fans, many of whom will have grappled with body dysmorphia and anorexia in today’s world of impossibly perfect Instagram models. Eilish’s sexual liberation nourishes her in the same way the unwarranted opinions of mass media starve her. “People say I look happy just because I got skinny / But the old me is still me […] and I think she’s pretty,” Eilish reflects movingly on Skinny, this album’s tender tone setter, a song which sounds like stepping into a warm bath after a long day.

Much of Hit Me Hard And Soft’s brilliance lies in Eilish’s uncanny ability to transform the complex feelings of young love and newly explored sexuality with a judicious synth choice or telling melodic turn. Album highlight Birds of a Feather, for instance, sounds every bit as unsustainably beautiful as a young love affair, Eilish singing with an unrestrained belt that sounds a far cry from the close-up whispers that made her famous. The washed out chords and sickly sweet melodies sound straight out of a Wham! classic, complete with a shimmering bassline and reverb-soaked vocals. For a singer who gained fame through tracks with names like You Should See Me In a Crown and All the Good Girls Go to Hell, Birds of a Feather is a shockingly lovely song that heralds an impressive sonic reinvention for Eilish.

Elsewhere, it’s not the complexities of fresh love that Eilish summons, but revenge. The Diner recalls an operation to break into her enemy’s kitchen via a plodding synth bass and distorted layered vocals that recall the Bad Guy days, albeit without any of the world-dominating hooks. A more compelling wander to the dark side comes on Chihiro, a track propelled by a disgustingly funky bass line that provides a muscular match to Eilish’s intimate vocal delivery. “Did you take my love away from me?” she demands as a swirl of synths begin to envelop her, successfully finding beauty amidst pained lovesickness. The track culminates in a compelling plot twist (“it’s all been a trap”) and a subsequent wall of electronic sound, although the payoff compares unfavourably to the same trick Parcels pulled off in their deeply underrated opus Everyroad.

Unusually for an A-league pop star, Eilish released no singles in the lead up to Hit Me Hard and Soft’s release, and her uninterrupted playing of the album in a listening party at New York’s Barclay Center last week suggested she sees this album as a single work, rather than a collection of potential chart hits. Indeed, Hit Me Hard and Soft is Eilish’s most narratively cohesive album to date, beginning with an ecstatic love affair and ending just as the heartbreak is beginning to numb. The cinematic turning point comes with The Greatest, a remarkable five-minuter in which Eilish’s pent up rage eventually erupts over arena-filling rock. “All the times I’ve waited / For you to want me naked,” she laments, but there’s a hint of self-deprecating irony in the conclusion that “man, am I the greatest”.

The self-deception continues in L’amour de ma vie, in which Eilish attempts to convince herself it was never love in the first place over a catchy pop hook. Again, Eilish’s anger bubbles to the surface in the song’s second half, although this time it’s via Hit Me Hard and Soft’s most contentious left turn: a pummelling four-to-the-floor kickdrum and, improbably, the sort of heavily autotuned Eurodance groove Finland might consider sending to Eurovision next year. Eilish has to be given points for her vagrant disregard for the pop rulebook, but her defeatist wails of “it’s over now” inevitably get lost in the silliness of it all.

A trendier synthy confection leads into the closing track, Blue, which features the sort of devastatingly catchy earworm a lesser artist could have quite happily used as the linchpin for a straightforwardly appealing three minute pop song. Instead, Eilish gives us a final creative flourish by turning the tempo right down and reflecting on how we tend to feel attraction to those who share our flaws. In the process, she deftly ties up many of the album’s lyrical loose threads, throwing in the beautiful strings melody that opened the album for good measure.

That said, for all Hit Me Hard and Soft’s thoughtful narrative and restless creativity, the 43 minutes do leave a lingering feeling that the most exciting elements of Eilish’s previous compositions – the body horror and masterful production of Bury a Friend or the apocalyptic finale of Happier Than Ever – are left largely unexplored in this introspective album, and bursts of experimentation are only pursued for a few wild minutes before a return to Eilish’s default spacey electropop. With its unapologetic queer love songs and impeccably nuanced lyricism, Hit Me Hard and Soft is a significant development in Eilish’s albumcraft, but there’s still a sense her best album is yet to come.

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