So this is what it sounds like when someone with tremendous skill makes music from themselves: “Hit Me Hard and Soft” by Billie Eilish is not only the most anticipated, but also the most honest album of these days.
Anyone who remembers the schoolyards of the past or still knows them today will certainly have in mind the territorial nature of these break areas. In the back right corner were the super cool people, whose circles you rarely got to meet, and in front of them were the not so cool people who copied and imitated everything. In the middle were the perplexed people who were running around too much in the hope of being discovered. They never were. Schoolyards were and continue to be microcosms of a world of meaning; this is where people check early on what will become youthful vanitas; this is where people win and lose and this is where self-esteem is still a delicate plant.
And in these schoolyards there were and are always the loud ones and the quiet ones, the boys as well as the girls – but wait, let’s stick with the young women. In order to get and keep control of their meaning, they have to be fast and loud today, burn off their words and posts like pyrotechnics in the hegemonic social media culture, and above all, always be the first, which means that they reflecting and judging everyone and everything else. But almost never about yourself.
Which brings us back to the quiet ones, the contemplatives, those who observe life, schoolyard corner on the left, not super cool, but ultra cool. If you now take this schoolyard as a metaphor for what has happened in international pop music in the last few weeks, let us briefly recapitulate: Taylor Swift and Beyoncé have supplied and loaded the market with tons of new songs, a total of 58 that you have to hear first – yes, then this schoolyard is only now becoming complete or, in other words: ultra-cool, with “Hit Me Hard and Soft” by 22-year-old Billie Eilish.
The quiet one, the one who looks at life and herself
Because Eilish is the one in the corner of the schoolyard on the left, the quiet one, the one who looks at life and herself, who didn’t already have six friends or more; who is rich, but not a billionaire, and who has been composing and producing her music together with her brother Finneas O’Connell for three albums now. You have to imagine brother and sister in the studio as if they were in a capsule, an introspective sphere in Los Angeles, in which Eilish recorded her first, then still cloudy, hit album “When We Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go” in 2019 and suddenly the gave a powerful voice to adolescent depression and the world-weariness of tens of thousands of young women.
A lot has happened since then and Billie Eilish has become a darling of the industry, winning a bunch of Grammys, including the Oscar in 2022 for the Bond song “No Time To Die”. Her idiosyncratic style was the cover story in “Vogue”. It all got so far that one had the feeling that Eilish had perhaps left the contemplative corner of life to get involved in the game of vanity fair. Their second album “Happier Than Ever” also had echoes of a musical roundabout.
They are songs, no: self-reflections of a woman who is now coming of age and who, after being outed as queer, takes the reins of sexual self-exploration very decisively into her own hands.
But now this: “Hit Me Hard and Soft”, just ten songs, but they are so diverse, compact and rich in musical inlays that they are completely enough. They are songs, no: self-reflections of a woman who is now coming of age and who, after being outed as queer, takes the reins of sexual self-exploration very decisively into her own hands.
Billie Eilish
“Hit Me Hard and Soft”
(Interscope/Universal)
Billie Eilish: ten songs – diverse, compact and super rich in themselves
Because she recorded the album at a time when sex became a dominant topic for her and one that she would think and talk about a lot. Just like about masturbation. “I have to say that it’s very helpful to look at yourself in the mirror and think: I look really good right now,” says Eilish. And, without being vulgar, this is what the album sounds like.
Self-examination and liberation characterize the opening song “Skinny”, which initially feels elegiac and summer-dreamy and sounds like a promise of what is to come. “Lunch” is the next one, a pop composition that is so precisely and cleanly recorded, in which a number of instruments are applied like accessories, and where the rhythm at the end sounds cheerful and almost self-ironic, robotic.
Well, now at the latest you should listen to “Hit Me Hard and Soft” with headphones, because how Eilish and O’Connell merge instruments, synthesizers, reverb effects and choir into a musical hidden object in the studio is something you better understand and admire it rushes like a stream thick and directly into your head. Another note here and a funny bass line back there and, oh, there, the guitar – and was that a triangle? Wonderful.
Remarkably close to what you can call a feeling for life
And with “Chirio” it continues, a confidently sung self-exploration that, when listening through your ears, strolls away over your own body, wondering here and there and being amazed, but the reflection always rescues you from the darkness of what is in vain or lost. Here Eilish is very close to what you can call a feeling for life. Immediately afterwards, “Birds of a Feather” sets an almost conventional standard: clean, clear drum rhythm, well done for minimal dance in clubs, but perhaps also the most daring piece on the album. Just like “Wild Flower”, a song that dreams away and in the end curdles between your fingers at a high level.
While Eilish’s albums previously had the feeling that the driving force was suffering, there are a few pieces on this album that give the listener the freedom to perceive the sound as a feeling and not as therapy.
While with Eilish’s albums you always had the feeling that the driving force behind the music was suffering, there are now some pieces on this album that give the listener the freedom to perceive the sound as a feeling and not as therapy. What you can hear best in “L’amour de ma vie”, a complex five-minute song in which you can feel the singer’s great joy in simply playing around, only to abruptly bring the song into a disco-pop finale in the last third to push it up in an AI-distorted voice – and leave it open whether and how ironically it could all be meant.
In contrast to the hype, intoxication and also madness around Taylor Swift and the very professional calculation and predictability of Beyoncé, Billie Eilish has once again made music out of herself with great skill, and in doing so has undoubtedly delivered the most honest album of the summer. Because she’s still exploring herself the way women do at 22. And because she always gains great insights in the process – she, the ultra-cool one, from the schoolyard to the left.