Billie Eilish ‘Hit Me Hard and Soft’ Review: A Deception by the Album Masters

Billie Eilish is a master of deception.

Her new album “Hit Me Hard and Soft” (on Friday) begins exactly as you’d expect: with gentle vocals layered over acoustic guitar on “Skinny,” a meditation on the toxicity of beauty standards with Gen Z-baiting lyrics like, “The Internet is hungry for the meanest kind of fun.”

But in the final seconds, the song takes an orchestral turn and then explodes into “Lunch,” a pounding lesbian anthem with a bass line so lean it seems “Bad Guy” on steroids. It’s the most deliciously perverted entry in Eilish’s catalog, with the newly minted superstar lustfully purring with insatiable pride: “I could eat this girl for lunch/As she dances on my tongue/She tastes like she could be the one.”

Eilish’s sonic trickery appears throughout “Hit Me Hard and Soft,” which does exactly what its title suggests: vacillating between elegant understatement and total sensory overload.

Across the near-perfect 10 tracks (sorry, but “Bittersuite” doesn’t do anything), the 22-year-old critical darling plays with tempos and genres as diverse as house and reggae – and somehow it works, thanks in large part to the stunning production of her brother and collaborator Finneas O ‘Connell, which reached a record level here.

“The Greatest” follows the siblings’ 2021 breakout hit “Happier than ever,” again moving from subtle guitar hits to the headbang of the entire band. A devastated Eilish silences the claims she only whispers in her songs, exclaiming, “I loved you and I still love you / I just wanted passion from you / I just wanted what I gave you.”

“Chihiro” also comes out of left field, with a muffled trance beat that traps listeners in the claustrophobic bathroom of a bustling nightclub. (Aptly, Eilish repeats “Open the door” at various points throughout the song. Even she begs to hit the dance floor.)

“The Diner” is equally absorbing, eerily told from the point of view of a celebrity-obsessed stalker who pleads, “Oh, please don’t call the police / They’re telling me to stop / And I just want to talk. ” Its rhythm lurks like a 1940s noir detective, ending with an ominous threat: “I saw you in the car with someone else and I couldn’t sleep / If something happened to him, you can bet it was me.”

After all, Eilish has always been a storyteller who isn’t afraid to twist a saying into something macabre.

On the ’90s-inspired track “Birds of a Feather,” which sounds just like a Drake song “Passion fruit,” her take on “Till Death Do Us Part” is more along the lines of, “I want you to stay / Until I’m in my grave / Until I’m rotting, dead and buried / “As long as I’m there the coffin you carry. Only she could do it This sounds romantic.

And then there’s “L’amour de Ma Vie,” a soft-rock track in which Eilish puts aside her distinctive voice to let her rarely used deep tone take center stage. “I lied / When I said you were the love of my life,” she sings before another 180. “Dazzling Lights”-style synths and distortion taking over the back half.

“Hit Me” is classic Billie, an artist who has been unapologetically herself since releasing her 2015 debut single “Ocean Eyes.” Nearly a decade later, she released the boundary-pushing record she was born to create.