Billie Eilish's 'Hit Me Hard And Soft' a Win, But Her Persona Keeps Me at Bay
From the blaccent to the cosplay gangster, sourcing who Eilish is beyond the moody music gets murky and performative.
Released on May 17, Hit Me Hard and Soft (HMHAS), Billie Eilish’s third album, is easily digestible amid the noise and chaos of online and reality, with ten songs at 44 gracious minutes.
Full name Billie Eilish Pirate Baird O'Connell, the 22-year-old from Los Angeles, California, found success at the young age of 13 with her single “Ocean Eyes,” produced by 26-year-old brother Finneas (full name Finneas Baird O'Connell). A simple yet poignant take on that immediate feeling of developing a crush, “Ocean Eyes” is a masterful experimentation on modern pop/alternative R&B and fans quickly took note. Eilish’s talents have landed her quite an impressive log of accolades compared to her peers. She holds nine Grammy Awards, two American Music Awards, two Guinness World Records, three MTV Video Music Awards, three Brit Awards, two Golden Globe Awards, and two Academy Awards — including one for her work on 2023’s hit film Barbie. Her latest album, which she and her brother call an “album-ass album,” could carry on that winning torch.
Before its release, Eilish spoke in April with Rolling Stone’s Angie Martoccio about its influences and updates on her life. “I feel like this album is me…It’s not a character. It feels like the When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? version of me. It feels like my youth and who I was as a kid… [2019] was the best time of my life…This whole process has felt like I’m coming back to the girl that I was. I’ve been grieving her. I’ve been looking for her in everything, and it’s almost like she got drowned by the world and the media. I don’t remember when she went away,” she said to Rolling Stone. It was shared her true self went away in 2020 during the pandemic — a period when she dyed her hair blonde and had “no idea” who she was. Working with Finneas since then, she’s found a way back.
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_2400,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fe6252b3c-bfcb-406c-bb76-367b9498f0c4_900x1154.png)
The album title, Rolling Stone reported, came when Eilish mistakenly thought it was the name of a Logic Pro synth. Still, she felt it an apt description. “I thought it was such a perfect encapsulation of what this album does…It’s an impossible request: You can’t be hit hard and soft. You can’t do anything hard and soft at the same time. I’m a pretty extremist person, and I really like when things are really intense physically, but I also love when things are very tender and sweet. I want two things at once. So I thought that was a really good way to describe me, and I love that it’s not possible,” she explained. The album features Eilish and Finneas’s live drummer Andrew Marshall and the Attacca Quartet, with inspirations such as Coldplay’s Viva La Vida, Lana Del Rey’s Born to Die, Tyler, the Creator’s Goblin, Marina and the Diamonds’ Electra Heart, and Vince Staples’ Big Fish Theory. Rolling Stone shared that two days after the interview, Eilish called anxious and worried she had revealed too much — she discussed intimate details such as her love for self-pleasure while standing in front of a mirror and being fearful of perception. That hyper-awareness of how she is viewed, for my HMHAS listening experience, came through the most.
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F72183c2f-c23a-4c16-ac4c-14c5c30c7c4b_767x428.png)
On first listen, “Skinny” stood out to me immediately, particularly with the resurgence of thin culture in mainstream media. From the Miu Miu micro skirt trend to Bella Hadid pictured smoking at Cannes — cigarettes often being viewed as an accessory to thinness — Eilish arrives when many of us are conscious of the messaging we receive from others, directly and indirectly. “Skinny” explains the heartbreak of realizing a whole other world awaits you when you lose weight. The song also discusses the same angst around aging and coming into yourself through first loves that Lorde, Olivia Rodrigo, Amber Mark, and others have done so well.
“Fell in love for the first time
With a friend, it's a good sign
Feelin' off when I feel fine
Twenty-one took a lifetime
People say I look happy
Just because I got skinny
But the old me is still me and maybe the real me
And I think she's pretty,” sings Billie Eilish on “Skinny.”
Throughout the album, the major themes are longing and the painful bite of unrequited (possibly narcissistic) love. Eilish unpacks its near-comedically unstable nature, building from lust and initial attraction on “Lunch” to accepting its conclusion on the final track “Blue” — where she reflects on how outside influences and upbringings impact the partner we choose (another theme filtered in the album).
For “Lunch,” Eilish explained the process behind it to Rolling Stone: “That song was actually part of what helped me become who I am, to be real… I wrote some of it before even doing anything with a girl, and then wrote the rest after. I’ve been in love with girls for my whole life, but I just didn’t understand — until, last year, I realized I wanted my face in a vagina.”
On “The Greatest” she sings, “Man, am I the greatest, my congratulations. All my love and patience, all my admiration, all the times I waited for you to want me naked. Made it all look painless, man, am I the greatest.” Eilish feels both ridiculous to have given away that love and desire to someone who doesn’t want it, but also a sense of reward in reaching that level of vulnerability and having that experience. Even though as a listener, it’s hard to judge how real this experience was.
Finneas explained to Rolling Stone, “I feel like [HMHAS] has some real ghosts in it, and I say that with love. There’s ideas on this album that are five years old, and there’s a past to it, which I really like. When Billie talks about the era of When We All Fall Asleep, it was this theatricality and this darkness. What’s the thing that no one is as good at as Billie is? This album was an exploration of what we do best.” I find this the most revealing statement behind the conception of their third installment.
Artists like Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, Doja Cat, and The 1975 inject their lived experiences into their art, answering questions surrounding their private, often made public, lives. Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter fired back at the Country Music Awards and racial inequality in country music, Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department gave her final word on recent lovers and took a stand against critics, Doja Cat’s Scarlet re-asserted herself as a candidate to be princess (or queen) of rap and hip/hop, and The 1975’s Being Funny in a Foreign Language was their most contemplative album yet; a look back at the stages that made the boys into the men they are today. With HMHAS, Eilish’s pinning could almost be interpreted as that towards herself. Beyond “Skinny,” the rest of the album blends into another regurgitation about heartbreak and angst, which is fine, but falls flat. There is joy in rallying around an artist who steps wholly into their work, naysayers be damned. Eilish could seek growth in her artistry, by stepping further into that joy. Even for an artist worrisome of perception and protective of her private life, as we all should be, there are still ways — Tom Odell’s Black Friday, Corinne Bailey Rae’s Black Rainbows, Sabrina Claudio’s Truth Is — to display growth, personality, and life, in music while keeping boundaries with fans and consumers. The Rolling Stone interview thus becomes more revealing on who Eilish is, than her art.
Though the lived experiences were few and far between, the album sonically blew me away. At times, a lot of times, Eilish’s voice is the boat, and the sound (beat, mixing, and mastering) the rower. The vocals and lyricism are the foundation as the melody and beat carry us the listeners to where she wants us to go, not unlike Claudio — a musician she deeply admires. Listening through the ten tracks, Claudio’s influence is rather hard to ignore, even down to the length of time and theme. HMHAS I found most akin to Claudio’s No Rain, No Flowers, an 8-song radiant achievement coming in at 29 minutes.
Like Claudio, Eilish understands her audience feels, and has felt, too much of everything. Overcomplicating the melodies or beats can elevate the record, but from the heart to the paper is where she thrives.
HMHAS is an album I plan to revisit but, I cannot ignore the Black voice in my mind when I do — also not unlike the Claudio listening experience. While Eilish’s take on pop music/R&B is enticing and refreshing, you seldom see the Black influences around her, just on her. In the music video for “Lunch,” Eilish sports baggy shorts, a snapback, chains, and other accessories and fashion statements popularized by Black artists and people, but she dons it almost as armour and partly as a caricature. Armour as if Blackness is the protective shield she hides within until she comes more into her actualized self as a white woman — a trend we saw recently with the skinnyfication and de-tanning of the Kardashians.
Finneas looked stunned in the infamous live with Eilish, streamed exactly three years ago today (May 23, 2020). Finneas tells Eilish, “Stop speaking in your accent,” she retorts, “I’m not!” In the full live, Finneas appeared uncomfortable in Eilish’s performance of what she perceives to be Blackness — a performance I can’t ignore when I see her on red carpets, and unfortunately when I listen to her music, as I question what lens her largely white and young audience view her achievements through. These audiences can cosplay Blackness and reap the benefits of appropriation, while not engaging with the needs of the community, but rather undermine and discard parts of the culture once done with it.
When sharing artists she looked up to in a 2020 interview with Vogue, Eilish said, “There's a difference between lying in a song and writing a story… There are tons of songs where people are just lying. There's a lot of that in rap right now, from people that I know who rap. It's like, 'I got my AK-47, and I'm fuckin' . . .' and I'm like, what? You don't have a gun. 'And all my bitches. . . .' I'm like, which bitches? That's posturing, and that's not what I'm doing." This ability to lean in and out of Black culture, while not understanding its roots, is noted in Paper Magazine’s piece by Rob Dozier. Dozier noted Eilish was born when Black artistry was prominently successful and easily digestible online, which could explain her reliance on it presently.
“When Eilish was born in December 2001, the No. 1 song in the country was Mary J. Blige's ‘Family Affair.’ Outkast, Destiny's Child, and Alicia Keys were dominating the charts that year. Jay-Z had just released his landmark album The Blueprint… The cultural landscape that Eilish and those born after 2000 and came of age in was one where Drake and Nicki Minaj were the hitmakers,” Dozier explained.
Regarding Eilish’s commentary on rap, Dozier wrote similarly of the hurtful nature of this appropriative cycle. “The artistry of hip hop and the people who make it has always been under question, particularly from white people, despite being a source of obvious inspiration for many white pop artists in particular. Eilish was echoing comments from another pop star, Miley Cyrus, who more freely borrowed from Black culture in her 2013 album Bangerz and her polarizing VMA performance that same year, later moving away from hip hop by painting the genre as not ‘positive’ enough,” Dozier wrote.
None of this is to deny the talent of Eilish, but to ask the question, if you want to make moody girl music, why do you need to cosplay as well?
Hit Me Hard and Soft is an achievement for the young artist and a step in a right direction. But to secure her place as a musical powerhouse, growth, a willingness to unpack through her art, and a little less appropriation (or a lot), could take this gifted star very far.