HIT ME HARD AND SOFT - Billie Eilish: Review
Billie Eilish
is a unique pop singer who broke through into superstardom in 2019 and has been one of the biggest voices in popular music ever since. Her often whisper-quiet vocals give her a pretty recognizable sound whether it's being applied to murmuring dark bangers or gentle acoustic ballads. While plenty of critics out there have lumped praise onto everything she's ever touched, I can't say I've often felt the same. Her debut album really rubbed me the wrong way with some of the cringiest lyrics and song topics I've heard in pop in a long time and truly disastrous production from nearly start to finish. But since then I think Billie has slowly been improving. I thought her sophomore album Happier Than Ever was better even if it carried over some similar critical flaws. Though singles like Everything I Wanted and the spectacular What Was I Made For? are among her best tracks to date, so I was optimistic.
HIT ME HARD AND SOFT arrives with both less and more fanfare than Billie's previous albums. On one hand, the album didn't have any singles and doesn't represent any major public storylines in Billie's career or personal arc. But on the other hand, the record has had an absolutely exhausting promotional push rivaling only Tortured Poets Department in its inescapability featuring listening parties that have reverberated across social media, an all-out advertising blitz on anywhere music is streamed or discussed, and a midnight firing off of glowing reviews from the kinds of publications that would give Billie a glowing review if her 4th album was a blank tape.
But so what, I've grown to enjoy albums with much more obnoxious promo. Plus HIT ME HARD AND SOFT gets off to a great start. SKINNY is the opening track and it combines a relationship narrative with Billie's public perception. The song implies that people say she's "Happier Now" for no other reason than that she lost weight. While the point may be slightly undermined by the fact that her second album is literally called Happier Then Ever, it doesn't make the song any less enjoyable.
The record has a pretty compelling run in the middle of its tracklist. After a moody beginning BIRDS OF A FEATHER is a genuinely bright and sweet pop standard love song that I was not expecting. While the refrains are quite generic and the stiff drums get old quick, Billie makes up for it with her performance and songwriting. I have no such qualms about WILDFLOWER, which is easily a top 5 Billie song to date. It builds up dramatically in the way her best songs do and results in one of the most satisfying conclusions she's ever assembled. The last two minutes of the song Billie seems to panic jump from one idea to the next repeatedly in a way that feels perfect for the song thematically.
That leads directly into another highlight THE GREATEST. It's an indulgence in self-congratulations as Billie details all the ways she's been there for someone who didn't give her the same support back. I do like that the instrumental is even more reserved than usual as she's more than capable of carrying the song on the power of her voice. The huge eruption in the second half is great, but my favorite moments on the song are honestly its quietest. Finally, I also liked the closing track BLUE. It's a nearly 6-minute finale to the record which oscillates back and forth between sounds throughout its runtime. In the middle, it hits a really great moment with these gentle keys backing a surprisingly catchy refrain given the tempo it's delivered at. That transitions pretty smoothly into a darker section marked by distant muttering percussion and an eventual trap beat that I love.
Much like Billie's debut album and to a slightly lesser extent her second, the biggest Achilles heel of the record is its production. But on HIT ME that lands in a bizarrely specific way, weird awful sounding outros that ruin otherwise decent songs. LUNCH is the record's big lead single and I like it in concept. Billie leans into the constant speculations about her sexuality by making an unapologetic pussy eating anthem, which is awesome. But I'd be lying if I said there weren't some truly cringey Chappel Roan-core lyrics on the song. The awful warbling effect across the last 30 seconds of the song, however, are a completely unnecessary addition that only makes things worse. Similarly BITTERSUITE is a mostly decent song. It isn't quite Billie Bossanove 2 but it functions in a similar manner for much of the song. It keeps up the album's bipolar approach to love and romance but also features a strange bizarre outro that has absolutely nothing to do with the rest of the song.
This is far worse on other tracks that actually have potential. The biggest offender is L'AMOUR DE MA VIE, a break-up anthem where Billie does this kind of cabaret singer thing she's deployed in the past a few times. I'm not exactly fond of this presentations style and I wish she sounded a bit more like an actual human being singing the song, but I do still enjoy the tune itself. That is, at least, until it's completely ruined by an absolutely awful beat switch-up that ruins the demeanor of the song and sounds awful while doing it.
The weakest songs on the album are CHIHIRO and THE DINER. The former feels like absolutely nothing for its first 3-minutes. Though there's a decent bassline and a good lyric here and there the full 5 minutes is a hard listen. THE DINER on the other hand feels like stepping in a time machine back to Billie's debut. It has this completely unnecessary frazzled production and a traveling circus-ass beat. I'm surprised she resisted the urge to work any samples of The Office into this one.
Like her first two albums, Billie's third effort is another mixed bag. While the record may be her most consistent yet it's hard to call it a massive improvement. Its predecessor Happier Than Ever has worse misses, but only because it swings for the fences more often in the first place. Billie Eilish could never be anonymous, but this album feels like the least unique in her catalog to date. Yet in a strange twist of fate, I think that very conformity made for her most digestible collection of tracks to date. 6/10
