Consumer Guide Album

Billie Eilish: Hit Me Hard and Soft [Darkroom/Interscope, 2024]
I prepped by listening with half an ear, a proven way to find out whether music has the power to grab you even when you've slanted your consciousness elsewhere. And somehow I came away nursing the all too vague conclusion that Finneas had convinced his sister to subjugate her uncanny pop hookiness to his home-schooled avant ambitions--to put their pop-tune hooks on hold and make an album where the musical gestalt was fundamentally textural. Closer listening, however, revealed that textures or no textures this missed the point. Tunefully enough and much more decisively, it's an album that explores in shifting detail both stardom and one's early twenties as hotbeds of erotic and existential turmoil--sometimes ecstatic, sometimes fraught, sometimes joined at the hip if stardom happens to be your achievement or fate, sometimes a web of mutually exclusive imponderables. So say it's a 22-year-old seeking true love and a superstar ditto. "I could eat that girl for lunch," a lip-smacking Billie tells the world. So "Pulling up a chair/And putting up my hair," she awaits a visit. "You say no one knows you so well/But every time you touch me/I just wonder how she felt," she frets. "Good things don't last," she concludes. "So you found her/Now go fall in love/Just like we were/If I ever was," she advises. "I'm trying my best," she avers. And at 82, I believe every word. A