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Billie Eilish Doesn’t Have to Do It All
Hit Me Hard and Soft can be gleefully disorienting, but it’s saddled with the timeless plight of the moody junior installment.
“Skinny”’s trip into the artist’s concentric layers of stress — it traces her grappling with self-love, relationship turmoil, and ever-shifting public perceptions — outlines the sky-high expectations weighing on Eilish to cut an elegant figure and use her platform responsibly while continuing to release work worthy of the voice-of-a-generation whispers that come with joining Elton John and Randy Newman in earning two Academy Awards for Best Original Song at 22. Both songs tap familiar formulas, the former smelling like old French house (or, to be more specific, the reduction of it heard in 2010s Ye albums) and the latter conjuring the relative tempo and sunny feel of Drake’s “Hold On, We’re Going Home” as a jangly guitar riff threatens to veer into Sixpence None the Richer’s “Kiss Me.” While whispering and shouting through effects in the track named for the lead character in Spirited Away, Eilish invokes the Hayao Miyazaki film’s waterlogged sensory overload to explore feelings of separation from her ideal world and circumstances, but the lyrics aren’t all driving that home: “Wringing my hands in my lap / And they tell me it’s all been a trap / And you don’t know if you’ll make it back / I said, ‘No, don’t say that.’” Sailing curt, gorgeous phrasings across a tight delay in “Birds of a Feather,” Eilish delivers one of her finest vocal performances, successfully selling the melodrama in the verses: “I want you to stay / ’Til I’m in the grave / ’Til I rot away.” The couple is doomed; the album never musters this excitement for a love interest again. It’s a riot tracking these turns, but ultimately they saddle Soft with the timeless plight of the moody junior installment following impactful freshman and sophomore albums, the quest to reach new creative heights not by rehashing or quite rejecting the sound of a beloved debut but by pursuing a secret, self-aware third path.
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