Get the latest gossip
Billie Eilish’s Audacious ‘Hit Me Hard and Soft’ Completes Sublime Coming-of-Age Trilogy: Critic’s Take
Billie Eilish's third studio album 'Hit Me Hard and Soft' is sharp, sensual and revelatory. Read Billboard's album review.
It feels like my youth and who I was as a kid.” And she’s right: The adolescent verve of her debut LP – which she often eschewed on the more reserved, plaintive Happier — returns in the form of pulsating synths and pitched-up vocal takes, but with a melancholic maturity that she’s gleaned from spending crucial years in the scorching heat of the limelight. Here, Eilish’s voice takes on a quietly choral quality, as if she’s singing in an empty underwater cathedral; her tasteful riffs on the back half preview the unexpected parts of her range she’ll flaunt later on the record, while the intentionality of her phrasing recalls the incisive heartbreak of 2023’s Oscar-winning tearjerker “What Was I Made For?” Drawing on the soft rock of Fleetwood Mac, Billie embodies the ethereal longing of the band’s biggest classics, pairing her emotive vocals with some of the most gut-wrenching narratives of her career: “But every time you touch me, I just wonder how she felt/ Valentine’s Day, cryin’ in the hotel/ I know you didn’t mean to hurt me, so I kept it to myself,” she croons, effectively rejecting verbosity for simplicity.
Or read this on Billboard
