Billie Eilish opened up about her upcoming album, Hit Me Hard and Soft, sharing that it helped her find her old self again.
In a Rolling Stone cover story, the Grammy-winning artist dove into her third album and explained how it resembles her first one, When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?
“I feel like this album is me. It’s not a character,” she told the publication. “It feels like the When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? version of me. It feels like my youth and who I was as a kid.”
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She explained that while her 2019 breakout was like a whirlwind of madness, it was still one of the best times of her life, which is why she revisited it for this album.
“This whole process has felt like I’m coming back to the girl that I was,” Eilish continued. “I’ve been grieving her. I’ve been looking for her in everything, and it’s almost like she got drowned by the world and the media. I don’t remember when she went away.”
The two-time Oscar-winning musician recounted that version of herself likely began disappearing in 2020, at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, when she was spending so much of her time alone. She dyed her hair blond and had no idea who she was, she shared. She recorded her second album, Happier Than Ever, in the months that followed, and while it received rave reviews, the “bad guy” singer noted it didn’t feel like her.
Finneas O’Connell, her brother and closest collaborator who has won several awards alongside her, echoed that sentiment and told Rolling Stone that he remembers that time being difficult and confusing.
“In a weird way, that was a little like being in a tornado cellar, reading a cute little story,” he said. “It was a coping mechanism of an album.”
Eilish revealed she doesn’t regret that era of her life because it was important for her to try something out of her comfort zone, which would eventually help her return to her younger self for Hit Me Hard and Soft.
“In some ways, growing on [Hit Me Hard and Soft] meant revisiting a lot of things,” O’Connell shared. “I feel like this album has some real ghosts in it, and I say that with love. There’s ideas on this album that are five years old, and there’s a past to it, which I really like. When Billie talks about the era of When We All Fall Asleep, it was this theatricality and this darkness. What’s the thing that no one is as good at as Billie is? This album was an exploration of what we do best.”
Elsewhere in the profile, the singer-songwriter explained her reasoning for not putting out singles ahead of the album’s release on May 17, noting that she doesn’t like when her favorite artists share one song from an album without any context.
“I really don’t like when things are out of context,” she added. “This album is like a family: I don’t want one little kid to be in the middle of the room alone.”
Eilish swept most of the song prizes this past awards season for her emotional Barbie hit, “What Was I Made For?” Not only did she take home the Grammy for song of the year but also the Oscar for best original song. Her Academy Award honor this year made her the youngest double Oscar winner in history, after previously winning the top music award for “No Time to Die” from the last Daniel Craig-starring James Bond film.
