Hit me hard and soft gay
Atwood Magazine’s writers dive into Billie Eilish’s refreshingly intimate and impassioned third studio album ‘HIT ME Difficult AND SOFT,’ a self-described “family of songs” that finds the 22-year-old painter at her boldest and most exposed.
Featured here are Atwood writers Christine Buckley, Danielle Furman, Josh Weiner, Kevin Cost, and Minna Abdel-Gawad!
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To start, what is your relationship with Billie Eilish’s music?
Josh Weiner: I have the least innovative “This is how I discovered Billie Eilish” story imaginable, but here goes: I got introduced to her five years ago in 2019, when “Bad Guy” was on the radio constantly. Since then, I’ve continued to follow and listen to her as much as the next chap, and I’m glad to watch she’s put out yet another record, which I’m sure is going to be another big hit.
Danielle Furman: I always loved the lushness and the texture of her sound. It feels like she has the unique ability to show us the inside of her intellect. She knows how to masterfully curate an life and make each ballad a tiny world of its own, and leaves it up to you to decide if you connect. “&burn” w
Billie Eilish: Hit Me Difficult and Soft review — confident and non-conformist
HIT ME HARD AND SOFT
Billie Eilish has always delighted in subverting expectations, but HIT ME HARD AND SOFT still, somehow, lands like a meteor. “This is the most ‘me’ thing I’ve ever made,” she tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “And purely me—not a character.” An especially wide-ranging and transportive project, even for her, it’s brimming with the guts and theatricality of an creator who has the planet at her feet—and knows it. In a firm 45 minutes, Eilish does as she promises and hits listeners with a mix of scorching send-ups, trance excursions, and a stomping tribute to gender non-conforming pleasure, alongside more soft-edged cuts like teary breakup ballads and jaunts into lounge-y jazz. But the project never feels zigzaggy thanks to, well, the Billie Eilish of it all: her glassy vocals, her knowing lyrics, her unique ability to create softness sound so large. HIT ME is Eilish’s third album and, favor the two previous ones, was recorded with her brother and longtime imaginative partner FINNEAS. In conceptualizing it, the award-winning songwriting duo were intent on creating the sort of album that makes listeners feel like they’ve been dropped into an alternate universe. As it happens
Billie Eilish opens up about sexuality, effects of fame and more
Billie Eilish's third studio album, "Hit Me Hard and Soft," is less than a month away, and ahead of its release, the two-time Academy Award winner and nine-time Grammy winner is opening up about how the new project reminds her of her first album.
Eilish, 22, who released "When We All Plummet Asleep, Where Do We Go?" in 2019, said working on "Hit Me Hard and Soft" has felt like "coming advocate to the girl that I was."
"I've been grieving her," she said in a cover interview with Rolling Stone published Wednesday. "I've been looking for her in everything, and it's almost like she got drowned by the world and the media. I don't remember when she went away."
'I was never planning on talking about my sexuality'
Ahead of the new album, the "What Was I Made For?" singer said that she isn't releasing any singles from it.
"I don't like singles from albums," she said. "Every free time an artist I love puts out a single without the context of the album, I'm just already prone to hating
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