Billie Eilish – Hit Me Hard And Soft

Alt Pop | RnB

68%

 

There’s an ongoing trend in graphic design (bear with me!) where companies are seeking to simplify their logos. Big bright colourful pictures have fallen out of fashion for corporate branding, with everyone shifting instead to clean simple text. There’s some logic behind it I’m sure. I imagine it’s a lot easier to fit a line of text onto all your products and adverts than it is to make a big stylised image work for all your needs. Often though the reasoning doesn’t feel quite that practical. No matter how well designed your logo is, that particular art style and aesthetic might not appeal to everyone, whereas a company name in a basic Word document font is about as bland and inoffensive as it gets. Strip too much colour and character away however, abandoning the unique and memorable iconography that you’ve worked so hard ingraining into the public, and suddenly you’ve lost all identity as a company. You’ve become just another faceless corporation hiding behind a sans serif font. 

A monumental part of what made When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? so attention grabbing and influential as a debut, was the sense of character and identity woven into it. Here was our introduction to Billie Eilish, and at every turn we were gifted another piece of the puzzle that together created a picture of an artist that was new, unique and exciting. It balanced dark and edgy aesthetics with tongue-in-cheek playfulness – each a refreshing take in their own right, but together they formed the high that modern pop acts, upcoming and established, are still trying to chase. When I picture Billie it’s that uniquely puckish goth pop which immediately springs to mind. I want something that sounds like it was recorded mid-exorcism, with the lyrical equivalent of a cheeky wink to the camera featured prominently in some earworm chorus. Happier Than Ever failed to build on that strong stylistic foundation, moving away from her established sound while bringing little new to the table to replace it. 

In many ways my criticisms of Hit Me Hard And Soft are much the same as those of it predecessor. There’s not a trace of the kind of darkness I loved on tracks like ‘Bury A Friend’ or ‘You Should See Me In A Crown’, and save for the indie groove of lustful queer anthem ‘Lunch’ there’s little of her playful side on this record either. HMHAS is Billie’s most safe and straightforward release to date. Its only true experimental twist can be found on ‘L’Amour De Ma Vie’, which shifts gear from chilled out bossa nova to driving autotuned synthpop. Neither half of the equation is all that compelling in isolation, but the way these two separate worlds are thrown together is undeniably interesting to say the least. It’s the only time Billie steps outside the pop conventions that she once danced circles around.

What’s interesting however is that this is a more well crafted album than Happier Than Ever by just about every metric. Its hooks, arrangements, production, atmosphere and cohesion are all a cut above. The sparse soulful longing of ‘Skinny’ and ‘Wildflower’ do a wonderful job of evoking the heady haze of Jeff Buckley. ‘Birds of a Feather’ is a strong contender for Billie’s most impressive vocal performance to date, with every second of the track awash with an unceasing stream of gorgeous melodies, while album highlight ‘The Greatest’ is a stunning slow burner building towards an emphatic climax that collides headlong with hints of Wolf Alice. 

My final thoughts on Hit Me Hard And Soft land somewhere a little muddled. There is contained here a handful of the best pop songs of 2024. At times the record is as rich and intoxicating as a fine wine. Yet if I was presented with these tracks without any foreknowledge or context, it would never occur to me that they were from Billie Eilish. While I’d hesitate to call such finely crafted soundscapes “generic”, they struggle to carve out an identity. Not everyone could make this, sure, but it could be anyone. It’s the musical equivalent of a company stripping away all their iconic branding – the final product may still be of a high quality, but all the character and charm that once set it apart is noticeably absent.