November 22, 2024

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Billie Eilish is funnier and angrier in “Hit Me Hard and Soft”

Billie Eilish is funnier and angrier in “Hit Me Hard and Soft”

“you don `t want I know how lonely I was,” Billie Eilish sings midway through her stunning new album, He hit me hard and soft. This sums up the paradox of her life in one line – a shy, awkward kid who became a big pop star too quickly, a romantic who never had the luxury of a private love life, a target of misogyny since her mid-teens. At 22 years old, she’s already reshaped the way pop music is experienced. But she has the ability to make the whole world stand by her side even when she fights it.

At 17 years old, Billie exploded with her debut When we all fall asleep, where do we go?, her memoir of terrifying teenage nightmares, with her brother/co-conspirator Phineas O’Connell. But after 5 years at the top, she still has the quirky flair she brought to her music when she was just a kid messing around with pop music in the bedroom for kicks and giggles. As she sings on opener “Skinny,” “The old me is still the me and maybe the real me.”

It’s been three years since her last album, A Wonderfully Troubled Catharsis Happier than ever. The new album sounds completely different, funkier and angrier. The music ranges from sad pop like “Birds of a Feather” or “Blue” to confessional ballads like “The Greatest” or “Skinny.” But even in a great pop year that was already a whole lot of bold statements from huge pop queens, He hit me hard and soft It stands out as something uniquely strange.

Fame still feels like a trap for Eilish, as she sings about feeling “like a bird in a cage” in both the first and last songs here. He hit me hard and soft It is her next album but also her next album, with a constant rush of fast-changing emotional and musical digressions. She moves from depression, isolation and misery to the downright electro-gothic lust of “Lunch”, where she exclaims with a muse who is “passionate, not impressed”. It’s got the mischief of “Bad Guy,” except now she’s chanting, “You need a seat, I’m a volunteer/Now she’s smiling from ear to ear/She’s the headlights, I’m the deer.”

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“Skinny” is an intense opener that captures the place Happier than ever She paused, but with the same vulnerable intimacy as her haunting Barbie song, “What Are You Made For?” The lyrics reference body image trauma as well as a relationship ruined by public scrutiny — she sings, “The internet is hungry for the slightest bit of funny, and someone’s gotta feed it.”

Billie and Finneas are one of the great sister duos in pop music history, always egging each other on to bigger surprises. They make almost all the sounds here themselves, although Phineas’ string arrangements are played by the Ataka Quartet – a rare moment when strangers are invited into the family’s sound world. It’s a tightly linear album, with an old-school pace of 10 songs in 44 minutes, none of which are particularly vague or ambiguous, and yet nothing moves in a straight line. The title “Bittersuite” sums up how the album flows, with songs that often shift mid-song and transition into a completely different song. “L’Amour de la Vie” starts out as a cute song in Edith Piaf’s café, then morphs into a high-energy disco tune; “Bittersuite” itself starts out on a dance floor, then slows down abruptly, then ends with a terrifying drone, like the soundtrack to HAL 9000’s demise.

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“Birds of a Feather” is a poignant 80s-flavored love song that could resemble Sade or George Michael, with its more emotionally voracious vocals. “I want you to say it until I’m in the grave,” she pleads. “Till I rot dead and buried / Till I’m in the casket you carry.” But the strongest song here is “The Greatest,” where she goes from a whisper to a scream as she bears witness to adult heartache, almost growling, “All the times I waited / For you to want me naked / You made it all seem so painless.”

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Three years ago, on Happier than ever, one of her most vulnerable moments came on “My Future,” where Eilish sang, “I love my future/I can’t meet her.” Her future self turned out to be a real hit of work — everything 19-year-old Billie had hoped for. He hit me hard and soft It makes you wonder how far she has traveled as a pop artist. But it’s also a good omen that the greatest Billy is yet to come.