Billie Eilish
Hit Me Hard and Soft
DARKROOM/INTERSCOPE
ABOVE THE CURRENT
With Hit Me Hard and Soft, Billie Eilish and FINNEAS have racked up nearly 10 years of achingly intimate, shimmeringly insular, electro-atmospheric albums whose subtle beauty is remarkable in a time when obvious display rules the roost (you know who I’m talking about). Produced and co-written, as usual, by the sister-brother team, theirs is a provocatively odd yet wildly populist aesthetic with abstruse, ear-worming songs digging deep into the psyche of the everywoman (as well as the multi-millionaire, Oscar-winning woman) while remaining boldly singular to the Eilish experience.
With a steady ambient whoosh behind a majority of its melancholy 10 tracks (and a lot of arpeggiated sequencer work), Hit Me Hard and Soft explores what it means to grow up in public—sheathed and sequestered by self-doubt, then nakedly open to love and sexuality—and find one’s voice, both literally and figuratively. The literal “voice” is important here, as so much of Hit Me’s vocals embrace Eilish’s usual athleticized Julee Cruise whisper in differing brands of shade and shadow until she stretches to find clarity and uplift on jazzy power bangers such as “L’amour de ma vie” and the winding epic “The Greatest.” The echo-heavy, aching, sinewy vocal run that fills the space behind the synthetic slaps of closer “Blue” waits for just the right moment of sonic hush to drop the clear, cold-as-ice sentiment of one so “beautiful and so deprived of oxygen / Colder than your father’s eyes.”
Hit Me’s complexity of music and arrangement from FINNEAS—the sweet-and-sour pulsating electronica of “Bittersuite” that ends in a morass of synth and steel, the ever-elevating, MOR-ish melodies that fill “Birds of a Feather” and the acoustic “Wildflower”—is only surpassed by Eilish’s emotional overdrive. Here, the heavy-breathing lasciviousness of “Lunch” and its click-and-clap-track disco meets the curiosity and coping of “Chihiro” and its softly banging brand of shuffling soul with scratchy guitars and bloopy bass lines. Though it doesn’t have the weirdly immediate punch of When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?, Eilish and FINNEAS made something more intricate and embraceable with their third album—something that definitely hits more hard than soft with every glistening listen.
