This is the least we’ve known about Billie Eilish going into an album. For years, the star’s journey was documented in yearly Vanity Fair interviews and candid documentaries; even Carpool Karaoke visited Eilish’s childhood home, where she still lived until recently. That seeming lack of boundaries between the pop star and her audience is increasingly standard for megastars, but Eilish’s intimate music made her a particularly strong candidate for parasociality. Her 2021 album, Happier Than Ever, was largely a response to public scrutiny, more reserved and mature than her 2019 debut, When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? In the ensuing years, Eilish kept a low profile, surfacing every now and then to soundtrack a Pixar film or win an Oscar before retreating to work on the next record.
To hear Eilish say it, the goal for HIT ME HARD AND SOFT was making an “album-ass album,” citing Coldplay’s Viva La Vida and Vince Staples’ Big Fish Theory as influences. Those records are also ambitious pop mini-epics where established artists show off their range, but there’s usually an outsider like Brian Eno or SOPHIE to get the musician out of their comfort zone. With Finneas once again at the helm, HMHAS is more of the same. For the first time, Eilish’s live drummer Andrew Marshall is on board, as well as the Attacca Quartet, playing arrangements orchestrated by Finneas and the prolific David Campbell. Never one to subscribe to a single genre, Eilish flits from minimalist trance to massive stadium rock, and the album has the same dense vocal layering and inventive percussion that make Finneas one of the most excessively documented producers in pop. But there’s no true swerve, just bigger versions of what they’ve already made—even Coldplay dabbled in shoegaze! What experimentation exists here demonstrates the siblings’ strengths and limitations as they enter their third project together, but it’s diminishing returns.
Thematically, HMHAS focuses mostly on falling out of love with a narcissist (as documented on “Blue”) and falling in love with a woman for the first time. Opener “Skinny” teases another record about the perils of fame, in the vein of Happier Than Ever, and it’s hard not to blame her: When Eilish casually confirmed her bisexuality in a larger Variety profile, that’s all the press wanted to talk about. When it’s addressed on the album, it’s on her own terms, as if the years of insensitive “queerbaiting” accusations never happened. It’s hard to stand out in the age of Spotify-sanctioned sapphic playlists, but “Lunch” is delightful for its matter-of-fact sexuality and the record’s best line deliveries: “I bought you something rare/And I left it under… Claire.” Though the syncopated piano and guitar riffs recall the most generic of 2010s alt-pop, Eilish maintains her irreverence with double entendres and zilch-entendres (“I just want to get her off,” she mumbles). The “Last Christmas” chord progression of “Birds of a Feather” feels engineered to soundtrack wistful coming-of-age stories, and sure enough, you’ll find it in the trailer for the wistful coming-of-age Netflix show Heartstopper. Both these songs are uniquely effervescent departures in her catalogue, but they never sound like a pop star playing catchup to pop radio—just the earnest enthusiasm of someone falling in love.
Other times Billie and Finneas might as well have switched on a large neon sign that says “this is a masterpiece.” Sometimes that big ambition works: The moody “Chihiro” revisits the uptempo sound of early single “Bellyache” but swaps the acoustic guitars for big, expensive synths, making up for the lack of real chorus with density. Several multi-part suites feel like they’re just retreading familiar territory. Despite a career-best belt from Eilish, “The Greatest” can’t escape the shadow of “Happier Than Ever”; “Bittersuite” devolves from its deep-sea dub intro into “Billie Bossa Nova 2” before timidly segueing to the closer. The nadir is “L’Amour de Ma Vie,” a relatively standard breakup ballad with a second half marred by chintzy synths and production that tries for negative space and comes up empty: After years of reinventing bedroom pop for stadiums, Billie and Finneas finally made something that sounds thrown together in someone’s bedroom.
Eilish does stake out new ground in her storytelling, delving into relationship messiness with a newfound maturity. On “Wildflower,” she describes her burgeoning feelings for her current boyfriend’s ex: “You say no one knows you so well/But every time you touch me, I just wonder how she felt.” The album highlight also thrives on those ambiguous readings: “The Diner” is a stalker song from the point of view of someone breaking into her kitchen, as if one more creepy letter will finally win her heart. Yet lines like “you could be my wife,” out of context, recall the same-sex attraction explored elsewhere; how much of herself does Eilish see in the role of the obsessive romantic? This is, after all, the person who wrote in “Hostage” about wanting to crawl inside her lover’s veins. Text the phone number she whispers in the outro and you’ll get repeated automated texts saying “it’s billie, call me,” drawing a marketing gimmick into the world of the story.
Every song on this big album has some detail worth hearing, but the insistence on multipart epics and ballads kills the momentum. When “Wildflower” and “The Greatest” crescendo back to back, it gets aggravating. The much-hyped live instrumentation is more window dressing than it is integral to the artistry, and Jon Castelli’s brightly saturated mix leaves the extraneous elements to fight for space in the more crowded sections. All these enhancements cancel each other out until HMHAS is just another good record from Billie and Finneas—certainly tasteful, and arresting sometimes, but all the session musicians in the world can’t make it a masterpiece.
