Billie Eilish says ‘Hit Me Hard And Soft’ is “the most genuine thing” she’s ever made
Billie Eilish has said that her latest album ‘Hit Me Hard And Soft’ feels like “the most genuine thing” she’s ever made.
The 22-year-old singer opened up about her attitude towards her third studio album during an appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert earlier this week (May 21), and described the project as her most authentic music to date.
“I think that with ‘Hit Me Hard and Soft’, it’s the first time since I’ve been an adult and maybe ever in my kind of creative life,” she told the host of the late-night chatshow. “It truly is the most genuine thing I’ve ever made”.
She continued: “It feels very, very me and it feels like all of the music is exactly who I am. All the visuals are exactly who I am, and that’s honestly terrifying. That’s why I’m literally shaking right now!”
Elaborating on why she feels so liberated by the LP, Eilish went on to explain that she felt somewhat pigeonholed after the immense success of her 2019 breakthrough debut ‘When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?’.
She also added that, because of this, she overcompensated on the follow-up, ‘Happier Than Ever’, which she released back in 2021.
While noting that the sophomore album did feel “very me” at the time, it was only in hindsight she realised that she was more focused on trying to prove something to her listeners than being fully authentic.
“[With ‘Happier Than Ever’] it was almost like a reaction of, ‘You can’t tell me what to do! I’m gonna do whatever I want to do and here it is!’” she explained. “I really wanted to prove a point and so I think I went so far, but that’s kind of what I needed to do.
“I needed to play this whole thing of, ‘I’m not what you think I am.'”
Elsewhere in her appearance on The Late Show, Eilish performed a live rendition of her new song ‘Lunch’ – which arrived as the second track on ‘Hit Me Hard And Soft’ – and explained the lengths she went to in an attempt to capture the image on the album cover.
According to the singer, in an attempt to get the shot, she was fully dressed in layers of clothing with a weight strapped onto her to keep her down in a 10-foot tub of water.
“It’s not like ‘What can I do that will be the most uncomfortable thing that I could possibly dream of?’ It’s more that I think about the visual before I think about how it’s going to make me feel,” she said.
“So I’m like okay, I want to be fully dressed, underwater, eyes opened, upside down and then I deal with how horrible it is… I didn’t have a nose plug so I was basically waterboarding myself for like six hours.”
NME gave ‘Hit Me Hard And Soft‘ a four-star review, writing: “Billie came into this process with aspirations to find herself, creatively and personally: ‘Hit Me Hard and Soft’ remains distinctly unique, a portrait of a singular talent entering young adulthood, exploring her queerness and experiencing the emotional thrill and (sometimes) catastrophe of chasing passion or falling in love.
“In trying to write an album for herself, she’s made one that will resonate harder than anything she’s done before.”
Following the album release, Eilish announced a huge world tour for 2024 and 2025, where she will stop by the UK in July next year. Find US tickets here, UK tickets here, European tickets here and Australian tickets here.
In other news, the ‘Blue’ singer recently revealed that she cried after performing her new song ‘The Greatest’ for the first time as it is one that she finds “really, really special”.
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Liberty Dunworth
NME
