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When Billie Eilish burst onto the music scene in 2016, at the age of 16, with her song, “Ocean Eyes,” a generation collectively rose to their feet and proclaimed her the prophet of their youth.
“This is how we feel!” they seemed to scream to the world. And then to her, “Continue validating us and we will love you!” I can’t imagine what pressure like that would feel like, but Billie rises to the occasion every time. She’s grown as the incisive voice of Generation Z.
Her latest record, “Hit Me Hard and Soft,” comes on the heels of the culture-shifting “What Was I Made For,” which won her and her brother, Finneas, their second Oscar. After such a monumental year, it seemed crazy to believe that she’d have enough creative bandwidth to produce a record as lucid as “Hit Me Hard and Soft,” but this album is as Billie Eilish as they come.
She has a singular voice, at once gossamer, bright, clear, but also nearly weightless and sometimes somber. It sort of reminds me of a sunset–all shining colors gathered against an approaching night. On “Hit Me Hard and Soft,” she deploys its range across her brother’s production to create songs that already feel familiar and lived in.
“The Greatest,” the centerpiece of the record, languishes in its build up before focusing its vocal and melodic attention decidedly on the last verse, to walloping effect. She and Finneas have never been afraid to create zones of ambience in their music in service of a visceral final result. Because of this, it isn’t a particularly transgressive-sounding record, but it’s impossible for anyone else to have made this music without forfeiting its personality.
“Billie Eilish sounds like she’s grown up at the same pace we have,” my sister, Lydia, told me in the car the other day.
My sister is three years younger than I am and was the first person who introduced me to Eilish’s music. We suffer occasionally from what might be considered a mild case of sibling rivalry, but we’ve always found an unspoken common ground in the music we listen to and enjoy.
The dusky timbre of Eilish’s voice on her album, “When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go,” which was released in 2019, cut through the loneliness of the pandemic, and my sister and I would drive around a mostly empty New Jersey, in silence, listening to the record together. Now, four years later, and at 19 and 22 respectively, we’ve been driving around listening to “Hit Me Hard and Soft” in the same silent agreement that Eilish has grown more confident in the last four years, right along with the two of us.
Cait Mead, a 23-year-old Kearny native, has her own relationship with Eilish’s music, but the sentiment is much the same.
“I got into her music young, so it’s been cathartic watching her and her brother’s artistry develop,” she said. Catharsis is probably the best way to describe the feeling of being seen and having your emotions projected by an artist of Eilish’s caliber.
To listen to an A-list celebrity explore the bounds of their creativity and the depth of their feeling while navigating world-shaking historical events in real time creates a grounding relationship with her work. People have always turned to art for such catharsis, but Eilish’s hallmark transparency feels authentic in a way that emboldens, rather than isolates.
Because she covers such wide range of feeling, the album might appear thematically disjointed, but pick a song at random and Eilish’s long term grapple with power, love, relationships, fame–all connected by her desire for belonging–reveal themselves in various shades of resolution. A song like “The Greatest” initially posits that unselfish yet unrequited love makes the giver “the greatest,” before ultimately concluding that the neglectful party had the chance to be her number one but blew it. “Lunch,” on the other hand, is overt in confirming Eilish’s long-speculated, much-covered, weirdly over-analyzed bisexuality. The subtext of such a song, by its nature, considers media ostracization about deeply personal discoveries.
So, then, the album isn’t as much groundbreaking as it is a continued extrapolation of Eilish’s particular sense of creativity and self. And in finding herself, she’s giving us all a voice for the highs, lows, anxieties and triumphs of growing up in a scary but frequently exciting world. She’s taken another step in a career that we will all return to in order to continue hearing ourselves.
Even after over a month of the album’s release, you can still feel the magnitude.
