It feels too early to draw a bright pink line through Billie Eilish’s recording career, but do we really have a choice? Her obliterating ballad from last summer’s “Barbie” soundtrack, “What Was I Made For?,” felt so delicately inventive and deeply existential that it automatically split her songbook into before-and-after. So into the post-pink we go with “Hit Me Hard and Soft,” a new album that finds Eilish singing in exponentially more exquisite detail, making her melodized whispers work like steamrollers, roller coasters, pneumatic jackhammers, bombs bursting in air, hard and soft for real. On its face, this is a breakup album about separating yourself from the people you love, including whomever you used to be.
Eilish establishes the framework right away with “Skinny,” steeping in her demolishing “Barbie” tone, explaining how “21 took a lifetime.” If your reflex is to roll your eyes at the idea of a 22-year-old feeling old, try a little harder to remember how difficult those initial seasons of adulthood are, when you’re beginning to understand that your past is irretrievable. On top of that, Eilish’s loneliness sounds compounded by the faceless cruelty of this digital world she was born into: “The internet is hungry for the meanest kind of funny, and somebody’s gotta feed it.
” By organizing those gentle syllables in a descending melody, she sounds like a puff of smoke falling down the stairs. Somehow, it lands like the truth. Her singi.