Billie Eilish Comes Into Her Own With New Album ‘Hit Me Hard And Soft’

Following her Oscar-winning turn for her Barbie song “What Was I Made For?” earlier this year, Grammy darling Billie Eilish is back with her third studio album Hit Me Hard and Soft. The project arrives three years after her sophomore LP and combines many seemingly disparate elements of her nearly decade-long career to paint a multicolored portrait of a fully realized artist.

In the lead-up to its release, Eilish teased that the album would be a return of sorts to her smash 2019 breakout When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? “I feel like this album is me,” the Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree told Rolling Stone last month. “It’s not a character. It feels like the When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? version of me. It feels like my youth and who I was as a kid.”

On Hit Me Hard and Soft, Eilish shows she’s stepped into her own after essentially becoming an adult in the public eye. Her expansive sexuality—which she opened up about for the first time late last year—serves as a backdrop for much of the project, namely breakout single “Lunch.” And while her last album was titled Happier Than Ever, she explained to Variety that this album might actually capture that sentiment more.

“My life is feeling good,” she said. “I feel like I’m becoming a person I really love and doing things I feel really proud of. In many ways in my life, I feel like I’m just now waking up.”

Ultimately, Eilish explores a wide range of emotions on the project in a mature and clear-eyed fashion. That makes this album title just as fitting.

“I thought it was such a perfect encapsulation of what this album does,” she told Rolling Stone. “It’s an impossible request. You can’t be hit hard and soft. You can’t do anything hard and soft at the same time. I’m a pretty extremist person, and I really like when things are really intense physically, but I also love when things are very tender and sweet. I want two things at once. So I thought that was a really good way to describe me, and I love that it’s not possible.”

“This album, to me, feels like a way to restart, in terms of my sharing.”