Singer, songwriter, and nine-time Grammy winner Billie Eilish released her third studio album “HIT ME HARD AND SOFT” on May 17, 2024. This 44-minute album is a complete shift from Eilish’s last two albums “When We All Fall Asleep Where Do We Go?” and “Happier Than Ever” this album not only has no pre-release singles. Overall this album and shift as a whole is something that has been extremely exciting and highly anticipated among fans and the album has not disappointed.
On April 29, 2024, Eilish announced on social media that she would be going on a world tour for this album from September 2024 until July 2025. The presale started on May 1 for American Express cardholders with the general sale starting on Friday, May 3, 2024.
The songs that are the biggest shift for this artist are “LUNCH” and “CHIHIRO”, two upbeat pop hits that both demonstrate not only Eilish’s sound shift but the change in her writing in comparison to her other two albums. Not only is the production on this album incredibly intricate, but the album is very concise, and in my opinion has hit after hit with no song that I believe to be not good. With songs all across the spectrum, from “SKINNY” being a slow, emotional song, to upbeat pop songs such as “LUNCH” and “BIRDS OF A FEATHER”, this album in my opinion is one of Eilish’s most diverse albums. The long-awaited leaked song “True Blue” was incorporated into the last track on the album, “BLUE”, but with edits to the lyrics and production, making it completely different from what the fans heard in the leaked version. Overall picking a favorite off of this album is extremely hard, but at this point, my favorites from the album are “LUNCH”, “CHIHIRO”, “L’AMOUR DE MA VIE”, and “BLUE”.
Firstly, the second track on the tracklist, “LUNCH”, is, in my opinion, the biggest demonstration of the shift sonically and lyrically in Eilish’s writing. This song is confirmed to be the lead single from the album with a music video being released for it on the day of release, May 17, 2024. Not only is the upbeat pop production, done by Finneas, Eilish’s older brother, completely different from anything she has done before, but the lyrics also show the shift in her writing. The lyrics and high energy of the song make it a strong highlight of the album.
Another highlight of the album is another mid-tempo pop song “CHIHIRO” which is assumed to be one of the singles on the album. Eilish leaked a small clip of the song during her interview with Zane Lowe on April 12, 2024, of the song’s chorus. The song includes lyrical highlights such as, “To take my love away/When I come back around, will I know what to say?/Said you won’t forget my name/Not today, not tomorrow” and includes production that boosts the song and its lyrics to immediately be stuck in the head of the listener.
Thirdly, the seventh track on the album is “L’AMOUR DE MA VIE”, a very complex and well-composed song that tells the story of heartbreak and love where Eilish reflects on a past relationship of hers. One thing that sets this song apart from every other song on the album is the outro of the song, where Eilish’s vocals are manipulated to sound more robotic in some ways, which is a total tonal shift in the song. Along with the tonal shift at the end of the song, at this point in the song Eilish begins to show through her lyrics that she is grateful for the relationship that was talked about in the song to be over. The storytelling and emotional aspects of this song, along with the complexities in the production and vocal production make this song a major standout on the album for me.
Lastly, the long-anticipated leaked song “True Blue” was incorporated into the last song on the track list of this album, “BLUE”. This 5-minute and forty-three-second song, the longest in her discography, incorporates lines from “True Blue” such as “I try to live in black and white, but I’m so blue/I’d like to mean it when I say I’m over you/But that’s still not true (Blue)/And I’m still so blue, oh” This song has two different sounds with the beginning of the song starting out mid-tempo and later turning to be a slow low tempo ballad type sound, but the sound ends with a robotic sounding low toned bridge. One part of this song that I find to stand out is the way that in the first verse many song titles from throughout the album. One thing that I found really interesting is the connection between the tracks “BITTERSUITE” and “BLUE” is that the instrumental of the chorus of ‘BLUE” can be found in the outro of “BITTERSUITE”.
As a whole, “HIT ME HARD AND SOFT” is an album in which Eilish described that the process of making it, “has felt like I’m coming back to the girl that I was. I’ve been grieving her” in her Rolling Stone cover story in April of 2024. In many ways, this album was a return to form for Eilish, while simultaneously being a shift in her sound, writing, and music.
Track list for “HIT ME HARD AND SOFT”:
SKINNY
LUNCH
CHIHIRO
BIRDS OF A FEATHER
WILDFLOWER
THE GREATEST
L’AMOUR DE MA VIE
THE DINER
BITTERSUITE
BLUE
