The Daily Telegraph - Features
ALBUM OF THE WEEK
Billie Eilish: Hit Me Hard and Soft
(Darkroom/Interscope) ★★★★★
Neil McCormick
Heartbreak is a painful experience, but perversely good for songwriters. With her third album, Hit Me Hard and Soft, the preternaturally talented Billie Eilish reckons with her first big love affair and its aftermath. Across 10 beautifully wrought songs, running at an economical 44 minutes, Eilish (along with songwriting and producing sibling, Finneas O’Connell), offers a forensic account of the giddy heights and brutal lows of an obsessional but flawed relationship, encompassing lust, adoration, possessiveness, infidelity, jealousy, sorrow, liberation, regret and bitterly hard-earned self-knowledge
Alongside Taylor Swift and Beyoncé, Eilish is the youngest of the triumvirate of female superstars currently ruling the pop roost. Famous for eight years but still only 22, her new offering represents a kind of artistic coming of age. She sets the scene with highly quotable opening song, Skinny, packed with references to her life in the spotlight (“People say I look happy / Just because I got skinny / But the old me is still me”) . “The internet is hungry and the meanest kind of funny / And somebody’s gotta feed it,” Eilish acknowledges.
A lot of attention will surely be focused on the lustily sapphic Lunch, in which the young star (who has been open about her bisexuality) really gets sexed up on record for the first time, teasing: “I could eat that girl for lunch / Yeah she dances on my tongue / Tastes like she might be the one.” It’s the album’s catchiest electro banger that puts it in the league of her biggest hit,
Bad Guy, yet it feels like a distraction from the painful issue at hand – the one that has always been at the centre of songcraft: matters of the heart.
The aching Wildflower depicts a complex emotional ménage à trois – and also happens to be the name of a company (Wildflower Cases) set up by Eilish’s rock star ex-boyfriend Jesse Rutherford of The Neighbourhood and his ex-girlfriend Devon Carlson. The enticingly weird and druggy
Bittersuite offers a shape-shifting account of a celebrity affair conducted behind hotel doors, addressing power imbalances that are also at the core of the wounded, self-lacerating The Greatest (“All the times I waited / For you to want me naked / I made it all look painless / Man am I The Greatest”) and sharply ironic L’Amour De Ma Vie (“You said you’d never fall in love again because of me / Then you moved on almost immediately”). Yet it never feels like score settling because Eilish’s songs relentlessly return to examinations of her own guilt, complicity, weaknesses, strengths and, ultimately, personal growth.
Musically, the album offers a refinement of Eilish and O’Connell’s established oeuvres, blending analogue acoustic intimacy with deftly weaved electronica, with Eilish’s soft vocals front and centre. It takes listeners on a journey towards maturity and forgiveness, until finally depositing us at the devastating Blue, an admission of enduring sadness that concludes with a tragic assessment of this doomed affair. “Born blameless, grew up famous too / Just a baby born blue.”
The title is probably not a reference to Joni Mitchell’s classic 1971 breakup album, Blue. But Eilish has made something rich, strange, smart, sad and wise enough to stand comparison with that classic, a heartbreak masterpiece for her generation, and for the ages.