You’ve probably seen a lot of Billie Eilish lately. Maybe you raised your eyebrows at her, um, intimate Rolling Stone cover story from last month. (“I should have a PhD in masturbation,” went one of her viral quotes from the interview.) If you’re a Swiftie (or a Taylor Swift hater), surely you saw her March Billboard interview in which she criticized artists who make multiple vinyl variants of the same record. (“I can’t even express to you how wasteful it is,” she said, never mentioning Swift by name but still ending up on the receiving end of some Swiftie blowback. If the shoe fits!) Or maybe earlier this year you felt like you were seeing her perform her Barbie soundtrack contribution, “What Was I Made For?,” on an award show every other time you turned on the TV. And even if you didn’t watch, maybe you at least heard about how Eilish won awards at all those shows.
At 22 years old, Eilish is already a pop music veteran. That’s partially because of how young she was when she started (Eilish posted her breakthrough single, “Ocean Eyes,” on SoundCloud in 2015, when she was 14), but also because she’s carved out a piece of cultural capital that few artists in recent years have achieved. Your parents have probably heard of her, while the same maybe couldn’t be said for someone such as, say, Dua Lipa. Apple Music just called her debut record, When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?, the 30th-best album of all time, beating out the likes of Ready to Die, London Calling, and The Velvet Underground & Nico. On paper, the success she’s settled into even feels old-fashioned: an awards darling who swept the Grammys one year and became the youngest two-time Oscar winner another year, often making signature songs for blockbuster movies and seen on TV and in print media.
But when Eilish first rose to fame in the late 2010s, you might not have foreseen that she’d become one of modern pop music’s most decorated and enduring stars in the conventional sense. She emerged as kind of a cultural curiosity—who was this teenage girl in oversized streetwear hanging out with XXXTentacion and whispering on all of her songs? Her fashion in particular was subject to way more attention than her music was at the time, and often with the icky underlying sentiment of: “Why would a pretty girl choose to dress like this?” (So, of course, everyone was extremely normal about it when Eilish adopted a more classic Hollywood glam look around the time of her second album, Happier Than Ever.) At the beginning of her ascendance, she put out macabre music videos and sometimes competed in “alternative” genre categories at award shows. Eilish was dubbed “pop’s biggest weirdo,” a “triumph of the weird,” a “neo-goth” (in a frankly unneeded Eilish explainer), and, most importantly, “the voice of Gen Z.” All of this seemed to suggest that she was an artist who wouldn’t fit so neatly into the old guard of pop’s mainstream, who wouldn’t end up with a music career most resembling that of Adele.
Compare Eilish to her peer Olivia Rodrigo, whose music is pretty blatantly the type of nostalgia play that the Recording Academy would typically eat up. Both have some post-Lorde and post–Lana Del Rey writerly flourishes in their songwriting, and both have been subject to the “voice of a generation” rhetoric, yet even when Rodrigo was favored to sweep the Grammys the same way Eilish had, she came away with just one general-field win for Best New Artist. Because Eilish had such a complete aesthetic as soon as she came on the scene, she felt like more of a capital-A Artist from the get-go; the Academy hasn’t quite connected with Rodrigo in the same way.
Last Friday, Eilish released her third record, Hit Me Hard and Soft, which begs the question, where does the actual music fit into all of this? Of course, the answer is somewhere in the middle. Even with all of the hand-wringing over her bold aesthetic choices, the music itself was never actually experimental, nor does it seem like she or her producer and brother, Finneas, intended it to be. Take that first single, “Ocean Eyes”: a dream-pop ballad that sounds of a piece with the kinds of tracks that were getting big on Tumblr at the time and ended up on the soundtrack of a YA novel adaptation. Or the lauded “What Was I Made For?,” another ballad that soundtracks the reflective scene in Barbie’s final act. On her biggest hit to date, the inescapable 2019 jam “Bad Guy,” she pushed the envelope with a bass-heavy beat and lyrics such as “bruises on both my knees for you,” but the result was still tame enough to be used to promote a children’s movie. There was some media attention regarding the use of a dental drill and staple gun on “Bury a Friend,” which is probably her most technically “weird” song, but it’s still all in service of a catchy pop track that could also serve as the theme for the newest season of True Detective. There’s only so much experimentation you can expect in a mainstream pop record, and even so, Eilish’s voice does a lot of the heavy lifting in setting her apart. Your mileage may vary on her warbled whisper, but there really is no one else in pop who sings like that.
That’s not to say there isn’t anything else interesting going on in Eilish’s music. On Hit Me Hard and Soft, there are some of the trappings of a “her most personal album yet”–type record, but it doesn’t necessarily feel unearned. Eilish’s songwriting took a leap into more confessional fare from When We All Fall Asleep to Happier Than Ever, and that growth continues with some moments of real catharsis on her third record, which leads her to use her voice in new ways. She yearns deeply for long-lasting love on “Birds of a Feather,” making declarations such as, “If I’m turning blue, please don’t save me / Nothing left to lose without my baby,” which leads to a rare full-voiced chorus. Her voice peaks on “The Greatest,” where Eilish sings of trying to do all the right things in a relationship only for it to still not work out. She full-on belts the chorus, establishing it as one of the biggest songs she’s ever made: “I made it all look painless / Man, am I the greatest.” Even while working within familiar sounds, it’s cool to hear her broaden the range of her voice.
Elsewhere, on songs like “Lunch” and “Wildflower,” she sings candidly of her queer sexuality (she recently told Variety that she was attracted to women and men, another thing people were extremely normal about). “I could eat that girl for lunch / Yeah, she dances on my tongue / … It’s a craving, not a crush,” she sings on the seductive “Lunch,” a bass-driven, pulsating tune that seems destined to be her next big hit. Elsewhere, there’s no shortage of her signature confessional ballads. The acoustic “Wildflower” cleverly spins a love triangle narrative wherein Eilish was comforting someone after a breakup and maybe developed feelings for her but then ended up in a relationship with that person’s ex. “I see her in the back of my mind all the time / Like a fever, like I’m burning alive, like a sign / Did I cross the line?” she wonders as her voice crescendos. Eilish is also still grappling with coming of age in the limelight, as she was on Happier Than Ever. She reckons with those comments on her appearance and persona on album opener “Skinny” and sings from the perspective of an obsessed stalker on “The Diner.”
That said, outside of some of the vocal performances, there’s not a ton going on here musically that we haven’t heard before. There are still many of Finneas’s production flairs, like atmospheric reverb and quirky percussion, and a number of songs evoke Eilish’s past work. (“Lunch” resembles “Bad Guy,” while the spare outro of “Wildflower” recalls “When the Party’s Over.”) Eilish’s music remains technically impressive, and there’s clearly always care and craft put into everything she and Finneas make, but there hasn’t been much built upon the sound that was already pretty fleshed out by the time her first album came out. Anyone who wasn’t already on board probably won’t be converted, and there are enough loose gestures toward artistic growth to keep anyone who was on board, like the Recording Academy, from being dissuaded.
But while Eilish has been a compelling figure in pop culture for half a decade now, the music itself has never felt quite aligned with the persona behind it. Of course, even with her relative longevity in modern pop, at 22, she’s still in the early stages of her career. And with how futile the Grammys can be, who knows how long her standing with the Recording Academy will last? (While she took home Song of the Year for “What Was I Made For?” this past February, Happier Than Ever failed to bring home any hardware in 2022.) Plus, it’s not surprising that being under the pressure of fame since her teenage years hasn’t exactly encouraged her to take a ton of risks musically. “The way that the world has treated me into feeling extremely anxious about everything that I say. It’s really exhausting,” she told Rolling Stone in April. “This album, to me, feels like a way to restart.” With Eilish seemingly everywhere lately, surely the next phase of her career will garner attention one way or another. But until she starts really evolving her sound, only so much of that attention will be about the actual music.
