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The 50 best albums of 2024: No 3 – Billie Eilish: Hit Me Hard and Soft
Stepping aside from her role as pop’s conscience, Eilish looks inward to tell murky love stories on her third album, and returns to her teenage flirtations with the macabre
She wonders whether she’s already past it (she turns 23 today, 18 December), considers the trap of celebrity and laments that she’s just grist for the content mill: “The internet is hungry for the meanest kind of funny / And somebody’s gotta feed it.” Eilish has been pop’s conscience – about body image, sexualisation, industry and relationship abuse, the environment – since her teens, a role she is incredibly good at but really shouldn’t have to play. L’Amour de Ma Vie starts out sounding beatific and nonchalant as Eilish reveals to “the love of my life” that they were no such thing, only for the track to shift and betray her breezy callousness as cover for a gaping wound: “You were so mediocre!” she blurts, her dehumanised Auto-Tune piercing an icy Weeknd-like landscape. Bittersuite slips between lilting reggae, phasing synth clouds and chintzy bossa nova, and Eilish sings in a crushed mutter about the stew of jealousy and false idealisation that would make two would-be lovers a volatile proposition to be avoided at all costs.
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