Billie Eilish might be the scariest pop star since Robbie Williams tried to become a rapper. In the video to early single “You Should See Me in a Crown”, she allowed a tarantula to wriggle on her tongue. Just last year, she brought an icy existential ache to the Barbie movie with unsettling ballad “What Was I Made For?”. gBlending playground melodies with despair-soaked lyrics (she wrote it in the depths of writer’s block), it sounded like something piping from a music box in a haunted house.
Eilish’s fantastic third album, Hit Me Hard and Soft, plunges into the musical outer limits once more. It’s a pop record you could play to fans of The Cure or Nine Inch Nails – a trippy, claustrophobic ghost-ride that declares its intentions upfront via the spooky cover image of Eilish underwater gazing forlornly at an open door just out of reach. It is also largely an electronic undertaking fuelled by her producer (and brother) Finneas O’Connell’s grippingly gloomy beats and big wonky choruses, which rush up from the depths as if gasping for air.
The LP marks a return to the claustrophobic sound of her early career. Eilish has described it as an attempt to reconnect with the brooding teenager behind 2019’s When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?. She had moved away from that darker aesthetic with 2021’s Happier Than Ever, which ventured into lounge pop and jazz. With Hit Me Hard and Soft she and Finneas revert to their original core songwriting values. The project rumbles with ominous grooves, whispered vocals and menacing refrains.
Eilish isn’t the most confessional songwriter, often preferring metaphor over the diaristic style of Taylor Swift and Olivia Rodrigo. She mixes it up on the new record, which arrives without any accompanying singles. The downsides of life in on the A-list are briefly touched upon on opening tune “Skinny”, a semi-acoustic number and the one track that exists in the same, stripped-down acoustic universe as her Barbie song. “When I step off the stage, I’m a bird in a cage,” she laments. “A dog in a dog pound.”
There is nothing more boring than a pop star complaining about fame – even when they have a point (Eilish was still a teenager when she became a celebrity and has since had several stalkers). But she brings the fun back with the steamy “Lunch”, a zestful declaration of sexual liberation where Eilish compares a dishy girl to a treat she’d like to snack on and which follows her statement last year that she is “physically attracted” to women.
Hit Me Hard and Soft also reminds us of Eilish and Finneas’s talent for the brilliant fade-out. Fans will recall the lurch into scuzzy electronica at the end of “Bad Guy” or the syncopated judders in the closing 30 seconds of “I Didn’t Change My Number”. Here, they go even further down the rabbit hole of eerie, gothic production. Dizzying dance-pop excursion “Chihiro” culminates in a huge chugging wig-out that sounds like a classic Daft Punk banger blasting into the stratosphere. Eilish repeats the trick on “Wildflower”, which morphs from a conventional chart ballad to shoegaze while “The Diner” pairs her vocals with stomping interstellar trip-hop.
She goes for broke all over again on tumultuous closer “Blue” – a cousin once removed from early single “Six Feet Under” – which kicks off with a cloud-scraping chorus and then pivots into a down-beat fade away, where she abandons the hook entirely. It’s a chilling, thrilling end to perhaps her best album yet.
Stream: “Chihiro”, “Blue”