Billie Eilish shares a lot in her new Rolling Stone interview—about her sexuality, her mental health, her experience with isolation, and her masturbation habits, among other things—but most relevant for fans is the direction of her new album, Hit Me Hard And Soft, debuting May 17. She and her brother/collaborator Finneas describe the new record as “an album-ass album,” which could mean a lot of things. In this case it means they’re hoping to create “a whole body of work that you love to listen to, top to bottom,” as Finneas puts it.
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That’s why they’ve been protective of the album, not releasing a single or sharing many details before it drops. From Rolling Stone, we learn that the album opener is akin to their award-winning Barbie track “What Was I Made For?”, while the second song is a total departure of a “sexy, bass-heavy banger.” The outlet also teases that Eilish’s typical whispery, delicate vocals go “full-throttle” belt à la the rocky title track of her previous record, “Happier Than Ever.”
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Other than that, the main takeaway is that Hit Me Hard And Soft is a spiritual sequel to Eilish’s debut album. “In some ways, growing on [Hit Me Hard and Soft] meant revisiting a lot of things,” Finneas tells RS. “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.”
“I feel like this album is me. 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,” Eilish explains. 2019, when that album came out, “was the best time of my life,” she says (ironically, she previously admitted to “hating every second” of making that record). “This whole process has felt like I’m coming back to the girl that I was. I’ve been grieving her. 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.”