Billie Eilish’s latest album is a dive into the deep heart of pop
Billie Eilish mainstream? Absolutely yes! Fifty million copies sold worldwide, including albums (3 so far) and digital singles; first place of Billboard Hot 100; first place in Adult Pop Airplay of Billboard; two Golden Globes and two Oscars for best original song; a (just announced) line of Converse sneakers dedicated to her. And we could continue…Not bad for a 22-year-old who achieved success as a minor and who, with her third album “Hit Me Hard and Soft” – released in May this year – has also (almost) reached maturity artistic. And she is already ready to walk completely alone, given that, in recent days, she announced that the next tour will be without her older brother Finneas O’Connell, co-author and producer of many of her hits. But you can’t just label Billie Eilish as chart pop looking for teenagers to conquer.
The former child prodigy becomes mature
In Hit Me Hard and Soft there is above all honest and well-made pop, which has the clear intention of projecting the former child prodigy with a problematic background and sad eyes into a more mature dimension. The title of the album is already a declaration of intent “Forte e dolce”, or the fusion between delicacy and power, between Billie’s two souls that chase each other and blend together through all the tracks and even within them. Darkness and light, sadness and lightheartedness, electronic and acoustic, in a mélange that is perhaps a little too balanced, both in terms of sound and lyrics. The latter explore themes of vulnerability, love and loss. Ten tracks without a hit, as if the whole album was almost a “concept”, or a sort of intimate diary. Eilish interweaves intimate lyrics with minimal electronic melodies, while experimenting with new sounds with constant register changes. The “old”, so to speak, Bilie naturally feels – the new wave-electro pop echoes of Happier Than Ever; the goth-pop variations of When We Fall Asleep, the whispered voice – but everything sounds more aware and mature.
Billie Eilish is the perfect artist for those who always feel out of place
The songs
The “serenely melancholy” Skinny that opens the album is a spare and minimalist ballad, with a light carpet of synths that fade into a string finale. An arrangement that emphasizes the theme of the song, the body shaming suffered as a teenager “People say I look happy because I’ve become skinny, but the old me is still me and maybe the real one”. Lunch, with its repetitive and broken beat, talks about desire and physical attraction but at the same time expresses the desire for a deeper relationship: “I could eat that girl for lunch, she dances on my tongue, she could be the right one”.
“L’Amour de Ma Vie” is a two-part song that describes the loss of love and the sadness it causes, but ends up listing the benefits of that loss. The retro beginning, with jazz and bossanova sounds, transforms into a hyper-pop beat complete with autotune. Birds of Feather, which borrows its title from the English expression “birds of a feather flocks together”, which can be translated into the unpoetic Italian “chi si simili si piglia”, is a strangely light alt-pop ballad with a text on the verge of tears, a kind of prayer for eternal love. The album closes with Blue, a song that is a sort of “summary” of the entire album, with its change of register: an almost dreamlike beginning to a dark tone at the end.
A future classic?
Hit Me Hard and Soft doesn’t make us scream “masterpiece”, but we are ready to put it on the shelf of “classics of the future”. At least as far as pop is concerned, he has already marked a new path. And it also marked it for Billie Eilish, the traumatized girl who in the space of almost 10 years (but she was only 14 in 2015) and without winking at any hype, went from Sound Cloud to global success.
Author: Billie Eilish
Title: Hit Me Hard and Soft
Type: Pop, Alt Pop
Year: 2024 (Darkroom/Interscope)
Editorial rating: 7/10