Switched on Pop - Billie Eilish hits both hard and soft

Episode Date: May 21, 2024

On Billie Eilish’s third album, Hit Me Hard and Soft, Eilish finally graduates from her signature anti-pop persona into full blown pop stardom. This record finds Eilish experimenting on the themes from her earlier records, while crafting an economic ten tracks that position themselves for mainstream radio consumption. There’s “L’amour de ma vie,” her five-and-a-half minute beat-switching eulogy for a failed relationship, or “Birds Of A Feather,” where she contrasts the soft, dreamy melodies we’ve come to know Eilish for with hauntingly dark lyrical content. This duality is a recurring motif throughout Hit Me Hard and Soft, with each song offering a unique blend of vulnerability and strength. These tracks, along with the rest of the album, develop a satisfying and diverse creative arc that speaks to the album’s title: they hit both hard and soft. This week’s episode of Switched On Pop explores Eilish’s new record track by track, unpacking the sonic duality of her new sound. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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It's free for iOS users. Welcome to Switched on Pop. I'm songwriter Charlie Harding. And I'm musicologist Nate Sloan. It's a big day to day. Today is the day that Billy Eilish has finally become a pop star. Da da da da da. Sound the trumpets.

Release the doves. Unfurl the banners. That's the song, Lunch, off her brand new album, Hit Me Hard and Soft. I mean, that definitely sounds like. a pop song to me, but I do have to ask if she wasn't a pop star before, what was she, Charlie? I know, it's kind of a ridiculous statement to make. She's clearly one of the biggest stars on the planet. I literally wrote the Vox.com explainer, who was Billy Eilish back in 2019 when she released her first album, when we all fall asleep, where do we go? We talked to her brother and producer Phineas at that time.

She has been in the limelight for a minute from her breakout days as a sound cloud artist, the song Ocean Eyes, to being a maximalist fashion icon, wearing Gucci everywhere with green hair. I've had many, many, many different hair colors since I was like 10. There's a documentary showing her rise as really one of the first big Gen Z pop stars. Hey, you guys need to be fucking okay, because y'all are the reason I'm okay, okay? And her brooding dark music has given words to the difficulties of growing up in a time when it feels like the world is burning. It feels burn in California. My turn to ignore you.

Don't say I didn't want you. But here's the thing about her stardom. It's been so much predicated on the spectacle of her being this young teenager when she breaks out, speaking hard truths about growing. up in the limelight where it's as much about the spectacle of her story as it is about the actual music. And frankly, her early music was so menacing and strange. I thought that a song like, When the Party is Over, I thought this was an anomaly. It would go nowhere. And about a bejillion Grammys and 1.8 billion streams later on Spotify, I'm clearly, I was totally wrong.

Damn. And she continued to play into this narrative. of being a young star growing up in the limelight. In her second album, her 2021 pandemic album, Happier Than Ever, was all about the tortures of being a young celebrity, having to sign NDAs with your romantic partners. In the following years, she had two of the biggest film placements ever in the James Bond film with No Time to Die, and on Barbie with what was I made for.

But now, with Hit Me Hard and Soft, I think that she's finally made a proper pop album. It's just 10 songs. I love just 10 songs. Like, it has a very clear artistic statement. Every book should be 250 pages. Every movie should be an hour and a half. And every album should be 40 minutes. And every show should be 22 or 50 minutes.

Okay, done. Okay, okay. In this work of proper album length, I think that Billy Eilich proves that she is a real pop artist in a number of ways. First, on the pop side, there are at least two very clear singles on this album. Lunch and Birds of a Feather are perhaps her most straight-ahead pop songs to date that are unlike her more brooding chart hoppers of the past. Second, on the artistic side, unlike many of her pop peers, Eilish is not worried about fishing for singles, where so many pursue the strategy of releasing 20 non-cohesive potential hits on an album, hoping that one or two will chart.

Eilish instead has made an album with a very satisfying and diverse creative arc where the songs hit both hard and soft with deliberate transformations in tone and genre. And finally, Billy and Phineas have drawn upon their film scoring experience to make a cinematic suite of music that demands a complete listen through. So let's hear how they construct the album, hit me hard and soft, starting at the top with the song Skinny. Start slow and simple with a soft vocal. 21 took a lifetime. People say I look happy just because I got skinny. But they hold me a Tell me it may be the real.

So it picks up on a public narrative that she has previously established about public fascination with objectifying her body. We've heard it on songs like Not My Responsibility off of her last album. You have opinion. And so on Skinny, she sings, People say I look happy addressing the public narrative of her, just because I got skinny. objectifying her weight, but the old me is still me and maybe the real me, and I think she's pretty, and I still cry. So it's a depressing song about life in the public eye. Very vulnerable, too. Very vulnerable about the expectations of this personal narrative, which is her life, is her

stardom. So is this on the hard end of the spectrum? I think that in many ways it actually is hitting us both hard and soft, hard emotionally. soft in texture. Ah. And the textures here harken back to a sound that we've heard from Billy before. Hushed jazz chords. And on this album, we also get strings. I think that Phineas has really grown in his film scoring abilities,

and there is a cinematic quality that we get on this new album. Love those strings. Beautiful strings, played by the Ataka Quartet. But this song is a total misdirection. Because from a skinny, we go to track two, lunch. This does feel like a new direction for this does feel like a new direction for Billy Eilish. And I don't mean to describe her as like Craven or something,

but it does feel like a little bit thirsty for a hip. She described the process of making this album with Phineas as just trying to have fun with no external pressure about making things that could be a hit. But if there is a hit on this album, it is clearly lunch. It is a sort of new disco bob. I would even say it's like a subcategory of just like rock disco. It's it's a paramour disco, you know? It's like this, it's a little subset of disco that's got more of a rock texture to it.

It has surf guitars that actually remind me a lot of the guitar textures that we would hear in a James Bond intro. So perhaps some bleed over from their experience on that soundtrack. But it's not the only soundtracking texture because this song makes a total switchup in the final third to introduce these sort of like Trent Rezner, 9-inch Nails synth sequences. This song isn't just a sonic bop. It's also a really great lyric. This is probably her first really explicitly queer song since Wish You Were Gay. But that song, which received some controversy when it came out,

is from a very different perspective. Since her first album, Billie Hodge has come out, and Lunch is about her desire for another woman, leaving her name under a false name, Claire, at a hotel lobby, and having a romantic meetup. Yeah, when I saw the song title, I was like, oh, my God, it's going to be the first song about getting pastrami at Katz's Deli. And then I said, no, it's a metaphor. You should have seen that coming, Nate.

It's a metaphor for romance. I'm glad that she has satisfied you with a song about lunch that is a song about romance. the bops continue on track three with a song Chihiro. So this is a cool track. You know, I think what was a little bit surprising and not in a bad way about lunch is that that is one of the few songs from Billy Eilish. I've heard that sounds like it's in a sort of identifiable style or genre. When I hear this, I'm like, oh, this is more of her and Phineas's usual lane. where it's hard to say like what this is in a way.

It's hard to label it. And I think that was part of what made her rise so meteoric is that she had such a singular sound and vision. Her voice is so unique. I really get all of that when I listen to this track. It's like, I'm like, this is something I can't really place in a way that I find very exciting to listen to. She talked about in the making of this album

that she wanted to have kind of return to youth. She was robbed of having. a normal young life being famous so quickly and wanted to go back to sounds that she loved making when she was a kid. This song reminds me a lot of one of her early hits, bellyache, especially in the way that she sings her melodies. So yeah, from the very beginning we hear on bellyache in its percussion should be a dance song, but is too slow to dance to. And Chiro's sort of the same thing. It's got this dark disco bassline. It's brooding. It's slow. This is a song that I'm I feel like the sped-up remix might be the hit.

And it's another song where in the final third, we get a total switchup from one vibe into another. This feels like a film reel for Phineas, trying to do like what Daft Punk did in Tron, bringing in these arpeggiated synths. And it creates this, yeah, very cinematic quality that we hear throughout the album. Okay, so we're about a third through the, through the rest. And already we've heard a lot of different stuff. Yeah.

What is track four going to be like? This is the cleanup. This is a cleanup track. So this is a big one. This is a big one. Yeah. This is Birds of a Feather. And it's the most romantic pop song ever written about rotting in a grave.

I feel like the beginning of the song, it might be the most sort of perfect exemplification of the album title that we've gotten so far. Because the music is so kind of soft and dreamy. I might even be hearing. like a synthesized steel drum in the background, which is like such a kind of classic sound now of like tropical house. And then the lyric comes in and it has this line about rotting in the grave and you're like, huh, that's not exactly what I expected from this musical texture. But I feel like it's such a perfect distillation of that idea of hit me hard and soft. It's like both of those things right there at the top of this song.

I think that this is the B side to love. lunches A-side. If A-side is that rock disco going to play on top 40 pop stations, I think, for the next 18 months, Birds of a Feather is going to play for years on adult contemporary radio. This is really one of the first times that I think Billy gives us really straight ahead verse, pre-chorus, chorus, post-chorus and a well-trodden 164-5 chord progression. This is an 80s throwback ballad. I think that it is one of the easiest songs to hit play two over and over and over again.

I feel like she's doing something a little different with her voice as well. You know, maybe the stereotype in a wave of her voice is this whispery, almost diaphanous kind of sound. And here it's pretty full-throated. It's a little bit lower in her range. It's really like belting almost. Maybe there's some examples of this elsewhere in her discography, but it definitely feels like pushing back against her,

the perception of her as a vocalist. Billy is very precise in how she sings every syllable. And I think you're right. She is showing a range here. It's not that super whispered thing. It's more direct. The song, functionally, it reminds me a lot of one of her contemporaries, The Weekend. The Weekend also very dark, menacing kinds of songs all throughout his albums.

And yet, on pretty much every release, he gives you these songs that you don't even have to know his name. The song will just play on radio forever and ever. It reminds me of a song, like Save Your Tears with Ariana Grande. Both songs serve as perfect soundtrack music to a young adult film in a prom scene montage, getting ready, driving to the prom, dancing together. My editor at Vox, they titled my explainer, Billy Eilish, The Neo-Goth Chart Topper Teenage Pop Star Explained. I don't think you need to know the Neo-Goth Teenage Pop Star. any of that to just vibe along to this song that could be in any film. And again, I think it's going to play on Adult Contemporary Radio for a very long time.

That climax was straight out of the Adult Contemporary Playbook. Very effective. And there's some more great climactic moments on this album. We hear the next one on the song Wildflower, which has a sort of slow-billed, R&B sexy vibe about taking another guy's girl. This is a slow burn, a song that a podcast cannot do justice to the moment where it finally breaks out would make Diane Warren jealous. Billy's vocals are huge here. Immaculately layered and they end in this ghostly coda. Wow, very haunting at the end there.

feels like the end of Act 1 in a perfect place to take an intermission. When we come back, the final five songs of Billy Aleish's new album, hit me hard and soft. Maria, you have a podcast now and you need to start acting like it. What's the first step as a podcaster? Well, you have to ask lots of questions. I'm Maria Sharpova, and I'm hosting a new podcast called Pretty Tough. Every week, I'm sitting down with trailblazing women

at the top of their game to discuss ambition, work ethic, and the ups and downs that come on the path to achieving greatness. I have a few pretty tough questions for you. Okay. Ready? Ready. Do not sugarcoat something for me. No, no.

We'll dive into their stories and get valuable insights from top executives, actors, entrepreneurs, and other individuals who have inspired me so much in my own journey. Pretty tough is your front row seat to the women who have demonstrated the power in being unapologetic in their pursuits. I hope you'll join us. New episodes drop Wednesdays on YouTube. or in your favorite podcast app. Nate, if you grow up on the east side of Los Angeles

and you want to make pop songs, what is the one instrument that you must absolutely have in your arsenal? Calimba. No. Wrong. Yamaha DX7. That's a cool instrument from the 1980s.

You don't need it anymore. Weird. I love this. This is a fun question. An 808 kick. Okay. That's probably true. That's not an instrument.

That's a sample. All right. All right, I give up. What you need is a rubber bridge guitar. Oh, of course. From my favorite guitar shop, old style guitars, episode 300 of Switched on Pop. If you want to be, especially in the L.A. folk scene, you got to have one of these. It's the sound of Phoebe Bridger's Garden song.

It's the sound of Taylor Swift's Invisible String. It's the sound of Olivia Rodriguez Lacey. And it's also the sound of Billy Elish's The Greatest. I'm trying my bed to keep you satisfied. Regardless of the underlying instrumentation, which of course I love, I own a rubber guitar. This is a lovely ballad with exceptional vocal control talking about navigating a broken relationship, where one partner is trying to keep the other satisfied, despite crippling depression that this negative feedback loop within the relationship is clearly causing disaster. And you don't want to know.

Something that impresses me about Billy Elish is that her songs often don't, like, leave any place for her to hide as a vocalist, as a performer, as a narrator. I feel like this is a good example of that. It's very naked in a way, and it really requires her to just sort of convince you with the power of her voice and her lyrics. And that's a very bold position to put yourself in. as like a pop star of this magnitude. And her ability to pull it off is like a testament to her craft, I think. She's also her own vocal producer, cutting her own vocals often. And so it's an incredibly deliberate choice.

She uses a microphone called the ELAM 251. It's one of the fancy, expensive two microphones that really extends the high end, all that breathiness, but also a lot of that low end. And so it just feels up close and intimate, almost like ASAP. are. Yeah. But I feel like this album has established that it's insufficient to stay in one feeling. We have to transform.

If something is soft, it has to go hard. Arms in the air. Lighters up. I did not see that coming. That was a really cool moment. You know what I especially loved about it? The metrical shift from 4-4 to this division of three, three, and two. One, two, three, one.

two, three, one, two, one, two. That was, that was hip. And maybe we should expect it. I mean, it seems to be that Billy Eilish is known for these final third flips, whether it's on bad guy or off her last album happier than ever. Yet, I think her songs often earn this transformation. Not only does it satisfy sort of the thesis of the album title, but it also speaks to the song's narrator's feelings,

their desperation to make this relationship work out, all the energy that they're putting into this thing, and it's clearly falling apart. You can feel the rising anxiety and angst of the narrator in how the music expresses the song. Where can we go from here? It feels like, I mean, what is left in the tank at this point? We can go to Paris.

The song's called La. Amor de ma'a vie. The love of my life. Ah, too. Bien so, yeah. I wish you the best for the rest of your eyes. I wish you could all see Nate's face. Someone's been listening to Loewa.

Okay, you're totally wrong. Are you sure? Yeah. Levei, who has given us great hits in the world of classical pop and jazz. Uh-huh. I think Billy established this frame long ago. On her first album, we had Zanny. And on her last album, she gave us a song called Billy Basanova.

Love when it comes without a warning. A lot of folks have given Levy credit for bringing this classical pop and jazz sound. I think Billy has been experimenting here for quite a while. I mean, be that as it may, Charlie. This is fundamentally different to me because of the way she sings it. It's not in her typical sort of restrained, sort of through her teeth singing. It's this much. more sort of open and almost Edith Piaf-like kind of tone.

So, agree to disagree, young Charles. Okay, okay, okay. I think she's one thing, you think she's another, and yet she's going to show us she's something entirely outside of what either of us are expecting, because, of course, once again, she's going to take Lamour de la vie, and totally transform it in a way that I can't even. even explain. Have you heard this one? Oh, I'm so excited. This is the same song. A quick trip from Gay Parry to Sin City. I feel like this is more weekend vibes here. Blinding lights.

I'm getting more Berlin Euro trance. Maybe some Charlie XX, Trois Avon, sort of style as well. Some of that auto-tuning. More geographically appropriate. Very, very surprised. It almost makes you wonder, like, was that whole thing like schick at the beginning? Was it sort of like a parody or something? The truth to only be revealed when you pull back the veil and enter the stomping techno dysphoria. Yeah. I don't know.

I don't know what to make of it. It's very unique. At this point, I'm thinking, wow, there's a lot of switchups on this record. It makes me think a little bit of the creative arc that Justin Timberlake decided. to make after the song, what goes around, comes around, became a huge smash, and it featured this very unusual ending interlude

on his next album, The 2020 Experience. He's just like, interludes everywhere. All the songs are seven minutes long. It feels almost like a strategy. It's part of just what we expect creatively out of Billy at this point. But perhaps being more generous,

we could also say that it could signify her moving on from this relationship, the things that have been breaking apart in the greatest. She's just going to go out in the club and dance and have fun and be herself. The sonic world of this album just keeps expanding. And I find myself wondering now we're in the last, what, three songs of the record. Like, what stones are left to turn? Are we going to return to some of the sounds from earlier in the album?

Are we going to keep on sort of exploring and forging into new territory? How about Carney-trap music? So this is The Diner. It is a stalker fantasy song about someone who has seen our narrator in magazines, followed them around, asked them not to call the cops, and imagined a whole life that they could have together.

I feel like this is Billy Elish's entry into the soundtrack of Stephen King's It. The video should feature a close. clown terrorizing some young celebrity woman. It's a really eerie song. Carney Trap is a terrifyingly accurate description of this. And I feel like this is like classic Billy Eilish in a way. It's a little dark.

It's a little twisted. It's like daring you to look away. It's also really fun to listen to. And there's, I mean, some of the effects that Phineas is able to create. Again, I feel like there's a certain dislocation in the sonic environments of these songs where you can't always place the sounds.

You're like, what is that? Is that a voice? Is that a synth? Is it an instrument? And that kind of feeling unsettles you a little bit because you're in this hall of mirrors and it works so well for a song like this which has this disturbing subject matter.

They even make it meta-textual by leaving us with an Easter egg at the end featuring a phone number that you can call to stock this person. You can call 3108.07, 3956, and you will be met with the voice of a young woman who is confused about your call. Hello.

Hello. Hold on, let me call you back. And if you text the number, it takes you to join Billy Eilich's fan club. Well played. I love songs with a phone number in them, especially a working number. That's always fun.

Owen Pallet put his actual phone number in a song in 2014, which I still think is one of the coolest things that an artist has ever done. Billy Alice on her last record did claim that she's never changed her number. She just chooses who she actually responds to. I didn't change my number. I only changed who I replied to. Maybe we are texting with Billy. Who knows?

Two tracks remain. And man, we've heard a lot of hard, a lot of soft. the two combined some fabulous beat switches how will Billy and Phineas take this project home? The penultimate song is going to be a suite

a sweet called Bitter Sweet spelled B-I-T-E S-U-I-T-E and it's about being unable to form the necessary attachments in a desired relationship

I think of it as her sick-o mode Travis Scott's song this is a song that will not sit still It's going to transform multiple times throughout. Beginning in the world of synth pop.

Moving into the world of dub. Transforming into if Drake's hotline bling or a Carney track before being slowed down and stretched out and turning into yet another Phineas synth film score reel. We can just taste some of the bittersweetness and bittersweet, but it's a five-minute long sweet. you have to hear a whole thing back to back to really get these transformations. And I think part of it is the transformation that our narrator is going through in this album,

from the false start of Skinny into the romance in lunch, into the falling apart romance, to the darkness of a stalker, and hear in Bitter Sweet some personal transformation before arriving at our final song, Blue. She sings about wanting to live in black and white, like living a simpler life, but feeling blue. And being committed to this feeling of being blue in this relationship that's falling apart that happens in the song. She talks about being true blue. This is a cool way to end this album. I mean, we just heard this, I mean, pretty masterful, sweet.

I was blown away by that part of the album. And then to end with this really driving track, it kind of took me by surprise because I was expecting something, maybe a little more atmospheric, but this is like, this is a banger in its own right. And it almost seems to be making a statement like, there's no filler here, you know? And I really like that about this album.

Yes. Ten tracks, and there's no filler. There's nothing extraneous. It feels very, I mean, I imagine there was a lot of stuff left on the cutting room floor in the process of making this album, but I appreciate that attention to detail

and that willingness to just cut this record down to the pith. That was really satisfying. She demonstrates a lot of command over the sequencing of this work by citing almost every single song that we've heard so far

in the first verse of blue. We hear lines from birds of a feather. We hear French from La Mour de Mavi. We hear her singing about being her best, the greatest. She alludes to Chihiro, while flour, bittersweet, skinny, and even lunch. I thought you were made for me, like a sandwich, if you will.

It's very clever, though. She really does have a command over this work. She has just written this sweet, and then is all kind of doing, what do you call this? It's like the, it's not an overture. What do you have at the end of a musical that goes back over all the things you've already heard? That's a great question. I mean, I think a CODA is definitely one way to describe it. It's not perfectly in capturing that sentiment.

Yeah, yeah. Well, and it's, once again, it's one of these songs that hits soft and hard and goes through a major transformation in its final third. I think really solidifying the thesis of the album and also demonstrating in this song, Blue, the letting go of a relationship, which is falling apart. Nate, I know you like a concise creative statement. 45 minutes, 10 songs. But if you feel like you were left wanting more, I've got something for you. Oh, no.

Is there an anthology? The very end of the album, a final Easter egg. But when can I hear the next one? I have Expeger to say something like, The CIA killed JFK. But this was a more anodyne Easter egg. I like it. When can I hear the next one?

The next album, I guess. Is that what she's talking about? Next all, next album. Next one. When can I hear the next one? Any Billy feature? Man, this was a, fun listen. I am also looking forward to the part of the Billy Elish album rollout where Phineas goes on a late-night talk show and explains all the random sound effects that he transformed into musical, you know, accompaniment throughout the album. I always enjoy that.

Well, that is one part of this album, is I really do feel all of his film scoring experience is playing out in the production, making for a really cohesive musical statement where we move from romance songs and break up songs. There is a really nice arc to the album. The album feels like an album in an era where so many pop stars fish for singles by putting out as many songs as they can to see, you know, which one is going to hit. And I think there's two ways that you can listen to this work. On the one hand,

it is an amazing album, listen. Sit down, experience the entire suite. On the other hand, I do think that this might be her entry into the world of almost anonymous pop star. I think that the songs, Lunch and Birds of a Feather, are going to sit on the top of the charts

and play on pop and adult contemporary radio for a long time. And I believe this to be true because, Nate, when this album finished up for me, the next song to play, auto play by Spotify, Sabrina Carpenter's espresso, arguably the song of the summer,

the most ridiculous, meaningless bop, disco, new disco thing. I love it. And I think that some of these tracks could play in the same sort of way. I hope for Billy Elish, actually, that she can escape the narrative of stardom and maybe just get to be an anonymous pop star

in that way with these songs. Probably not, but that's what I want for the music. I smell a Vegas residency in their future. Switch on Pop is produced by Rhina Cruz, edited by Art Chung, engineered by Brandon McFarlane, illustrations by Armas Scott Leave, tuning management by Abby Barr, our executive producer is Nishaw Kerwa.

Remember for the Vox Media Podcast Network and a production of Vulture, which is part of New York Magazine. You can subscribe at nymag.com slash pod. Find more episodes of Switched on Pop anywhere you listen to podcasts and our website switched onpop.com. We'll be back next week with a brand new episode. And until then,

Thanks for listening. Thanks for listening. You remember when you interviewed Phineas and you did, forgot to turn on the recorder and you had an entire conversation with him. He didn't know. And then you said, I'm so sorry, we had a technical issue and we need to do that again. That's not what happened.

What happened? What happened was that I hit record in my recorder as I walked into the room to get the footsteps and all that kind of like great, hey, look, we're getting into the space. It was a at the Coachella sound stage that they were practicing on. And then somehow, most of all I was like shaking his hand and holding my recorder. I must have bumped to the record button again and it turned off in about 40 minutes into the interview. I was like, hey, Phineas, you know, my editor wants to have a really, like, a really, like, tight conversation. Do you mind if I ask you some questions again? He was like, oh, yeah, cool.

He was totally. Either was being really nice to me or didn't even notice. Either way, I remember the takeaway being that he was, that was a really nice thing that he did for us. Attention, Spotify. Has arrived at the new Google Jasmine Absolute of Carolina Herrera, A fragrance intense with character Gourman and addictive. Imagine a jasmine emvolventy, caramelized and tonka-tosted. A combination that seduce from the first instant and doesn't

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