The 50 best albums of 2024: No 3 – Billie Eilish: Hit Me Hard and Soft

Stepping aside from her role as pop’s conscience, Eilish looks inward to tell murky love stories on her third album, and returns to her teenage flirtations with the macabre

• The 50 best albums of 2024
• More on the best culture of 2024

As with Billie Eilish’s last album, 2021’s Happier Than Ever, Hit Me Hard and Soft opens with a state of the nation that reflects her personal experiences through the media funhouse mirror. “People say I look happy / Just because I got skinny,” she sings in a bittersweet voice as limpid, bluesy guitar rolls behind her. She wonders whether she’s already past it (she turns 23 today, 18 December), considers the trap of celebrity and laments that she’s just grist for the content mill: “The internet is hungry for the meanest kind of funny / And somebody’s gotta feed it.” Eilish has been pop’s conscience – about body image, sexualisation, industry and relationship abuse, the environment – since her teens, a role she is incredibly good at but really shouldn’t have to play. Then the song pivots, and Eilish addresses an ex, in a nightingale-like voice: “I never did you wrong.”

Culpability in a breakup, and – as with the paradox in the album title – the impossibility of identifying the villain in a complex situation are the murky themes of Eilish’s third album: sometimes anguished, sometimes vindictive, always satisfyingly messy and candid. Rather than reflect generational angst (as her debut did) or the hell of teenage fame, Hit Me Hard and Soft is insular and intimate, right down to the fantastically prosaic lyric in Lunch – about her newfound desire to intimately acquaint herself with the fairer sex – where she’s “pullin’ up a chair” and “puttin’ up my hair” as she prepares to get stuck in. Lunch is an apt title: desire nourishes and depletes across these 10 songs, and by ragged epic The Greatest (as raw as any Sharon Van Etten rager), Eilish wails in frustration about “All the times I waited / For you to want me naked”, recriminating herself and her estranged lover from breath to breath.

Topics

The 50 best albums of 2024: No 4 – Clairo: Charm

The singer-songwriter’s best album yet conjures low-lit jazz bars with swelling, sultry songs of attraction and desire, fleshed out with flurries of brass and vintage Wurlitzers • The 50 best ...
The Guardian - 1d
The 50 best albums of 2024: No 5 – Beyoncé: Cowboy Carter

This freewheeling embrace of the singer’s roots was also a triumphant reclamation of a genre that had long shunned its Black origins. • The 50 best albums of 2024 • More on the best culture of ...
The Guardian - 2d
Best movies of 2024 in the US: No 5 – Hard Truths

Marianne Jean-Baptiste gives an immense, acidic performance as Pansy, a woman on the edge, in Mike Leigh’s strange, morbid miracle of a film • Our countdown of the top 50 films in the US in 2024 ...
The Guardian - 2d
The 10 best global albums of 2024

DJ Love celebrated car horns, Kenyan metalhead Lord Spikeheart traversed trap and doom, while 82-year-old Milton Nascimento joined forces with Esperanza Spalding. • More on the best music of 2024 ...
The Guardian - Dec. 11
The 20 best albums of 2024

Check out the 20 best albums of 2024 as selected by Times pop music critic Mikael Wood.
Los Angeles Times - Dec. 11
The 50 best albums of 2024: 50-11

Nick Cave rediscovers his lust for life, Ariana Grande embraces new love, and Kneecap raise a Republican ruckus, as we continue the countdown of the year’s best albums. • More on the best culture ...
The Guardian - Dec. 10
Extended interview: Billie Eilish

In this web exclusive, "Sunday Morning" correspondent Anthony Mason sits down with music superstar Billie Eilish to talk about performing on her "Hit Me Hard and Soft" tour (her first without ...
CBS News - Dec. 10
Preview: Billie Eilish on finally seeing herself as a songwriter

In this preview clip, correspondent Anthony Mason sits down with music superstar Billie Eilish to talk about the creative process. Don't miss Mason's interview with Eilish on "CBS Sunday Morning" ...
CBS News - Dec. 5
AP's top albums of 2024: Beyoncé, Charli XCX, Kendrick Lamar, Billie Eilish, Mk.gee and more

Associated Press Music Writer Maria Sherman has chosen 10 of the best albums of 2024
ABC News - Dec. 5