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The strikingly ambitious and unpredictable Hit Me Hard And Soft could very well be Billie Eilish's OK Computer.
For this one, we'll defer to Kops' in-house music writer Ben Rayner's year-end review of Hit Me Hard And Soft in the Toronto Star, published on Dec. 13 of 2024. And yes, he did indeed pick it as his album of the year:
In an era of trickle-down single releases, bite-sized TikTok insta-stardom and overstuffed multi-track opuses designed to game whatever voodoo governs the streaming-fixated charts nowadays, Billie Eilish made a proper album-album in 2024. And won. Hit Me Hard and Soft is 44 minutes — two sides, if you will — of perfectly orchestrated and perfectly sequenced pop genius put forth at the perfect moment in the 22-year-old performer’s nascent career to certify her as a “real deal” artist.
This record flows. Hit Me Hard and Soft — recorded, as always, with her equally talented brother Finneas O’Connell at the production reins — plays out like a febrile, honestly messed-up real-time chronicle of a broken relationship, its mood abruptly diving from the Sappho-sexy elation of monster single “Lunch” to the resigned 4/4 house pulse of “Chihiro” and the wrenching, all-in power-ballad angst of “Wildflower” and “The Greatest” before bouncing back up again into a species of release with the outta-nowhere A-Ha outro to “L’Amour de ma vie” And then dissolving into cabaret- and Kraftwerk-shrouded prog weirdness on the back end before reaching a point of complete uncertainty with the devastating dissolve that is “Blue.”
TRACKLISTING: