Hit Me Hard and Soft is another awards-worthy album for Billie Eilish

The girls have all been extra busy releasing new albums and all of them are likely strong contenders in next year’s awards season. Arianna Grande with Eternal Sunshine; Dua Lipa with Radical Optimism; Taylor Swift and her The Tortured Poet’s Department; Doja Cat had Scarlett; Jennifer Lopez with This is Me…Now; and Beyoncé with the monumental Cowboy Carter.

Do not be surprised if finalists for the 2025 Grammys or the American Music Awards, etc., turn out to be all female with a smattering of the ever-industrious rappers like Kendrick Lamar, Drake, Future, etc. It would be even more interesting if Lady Gaga will join the fray? What about Olivia Rodrigo? Maybe. The latest who is now already in contention as of a few days ago is the oh-so-young and oh-so-talented Billie Eilish with her new album Hit Me Hard and Soft.

Billie Eilish, only 22 years old, is one of the most sensational artists of this generation. She swept the Grammys, including the Album of the Year Award and the Best Pop Vocal Album for her debut studio album When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? She has already won two Academy Awards for Best Original Song, No Time to Die in 2023 for the James Bond movie of the same title and What Was I Made For, from the Barbie soundtrack this year. I have a feeling she might bring home two or three or more trophies for Hit Me Hard and Soft.

This is Eilish’s third album and her follow-up to Happier Than Ever from three years ago. As usual it is a collaboration with her brother Finneas O’Connell. Now oozing with self-confidence and with nothing more to prove, it looks like the sibs challenged themselves as songwriters and producers and the result is truly impressive. There are only 10 tracks, short and simple compared to those other diva artists albums, but each cut scores a bull’s-eye.

Hit Me Hard and Soft is pure honesty. Eilish has laid out her most intimate feelings for us to listen to. Think of her sexual fantasies in the first single Lunch. The album is daring. Success has given brother and sister the nerve to eschew conventional music structure to do what they want. So, they did what they want, like mixing rock with alt-pop in The Greatest or pop and electro in L’Amour de Ma Vie. It is also unpredictable. What about having that bare piano in Wildflower to center the album and then that loud, reverberating bass in Bittersuite, to lead to the closer Blue.

Holding everything together is Eilish’s incredible soprano voice. She reminds me of Pat Benatar at times. They are girls who rock but who could have also conquered opera. But Eilish’s vocals has more body and can go smoothly from an angry roar to a sweet whisper without missing a beat. And then there is also the fact that she has this great gift for words and she wrote some of her best lines ever for the songs in Hit Me Hard and Soft.

See how Eilish opens the album with Skinny, which takes a look at herself and success. “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.” Still, she hints of insecurity in the laidback love ballad Wildflower, “You say, no one knows you so well/ but every time you touch me/ I just wonder how she felt.”

Then, Eilish goes to the emotional Blue as the end track. Interestingly the song is a fully-realized epilog of the whole album. It has snippets from the previous cuts and comes across as a kind of summing up of her heartbreak odyssey. She sings, “I’d like to mean it/ when I say I’m over you/ but that’s still not true.”

Not true indeed. Whoever gave Eilish her heartbreak has a leading role in Hit Me Hard and Soft. Too bad that unlike Swift, Eilish provides no hints as to who or she is. But who cares, the watershed of creativity he or she unleashed is something to marvel at and to be grateful for.