Singer Billie Eilish has given fans a look at the meaning behind the juxtaposing title of her forthcoming album, HIT ME HARD AND SOFT, revealing, that she thought the idea was “a really good way to describe me, and I love that it’s not possible.”
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In a new Rolling Stone cover interview, singer Billie Eilish is joined while on set with photographer William Drumm, shooting the cover for her third studio album, HIT ME HARD AND SOFT, scheduled for release on May 17. Fully clothed, weighted, and submerged under water “basically waterboarding myself for six hours,” she explains, but perfectly happy to be doing so.
“If there’s one thing about me, it is I will put myself through hell and back for the shot,” she reveals. “I’ve always been like that, and I will continue to be like that. A lot of my artwork is painful physically in a lot of ways, and I love it. Oh, my God, I live for it.”
The album’s title HIT ME HARD AND SOFT, Billie says, initially arrived during a writing session with her brother and collaborator FINNEAS, and explains during the wide-ranging interview how she originally mistook the phrase as the name of a Logic Pro synth sound. That notion, she thought, “was such a perfect encapsulation of what this album does. It’s an impossible request: You can’t be hit hard and soft,” she remarks. “You can’t do anything hard and soft at the same time.”
“I’m a pretty extremist person, and I really like when things are really intense physically,” Eilish adds, “but I also love when things are very tender and sweet. I want two things at once. So I thought that was a really good way to describe me, and I love that it’s not possible.”
“I feel like this album is me” she says, regarding getting back in touch with her darker side. “It’s not a character. It feels like the ‘When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?’ version of me. It feels like my youth and who I was as a kid.”
FINNEAS adds, “I feel like this album has some real ghosts in it, and I say that with love. There’s ideas on this album that are five years old, and there’s a past to it, which I really like. When Billie talks about the era of ‘When We All Fall Asleep,’ it was this theatricality and this darkness. What’s the thing that no one is as good at as Billie is? This album was an exploration of what we do best.”
Read the full conversation right here.
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HIT ME HARD AND SOFT, Billie Eilish's highly-anticipated follow-up to 2021's GRAMMY-nominated Happier Than Ever is set for release on May 17. Pre-orders are available now.