(Image via rateyourmusic.com)
Staff Writer: Olivia Beaudette
Email: obeaudette@umassd.edu
In April, Billie Eilish announced her upcoming album HIT ME HARD AND SOFT, which will be released on May 17.
Eilish has had a quickly growing career leading up to this point.
Where She Started
In 2015, 14-year-old Billie Eilish released her song Ocean Eyes on SoundCloud, which jump-started her rapid success as an artist.
By 2017, she released her debut album, Don’t Smile at Me. She was only 16 at the time of this release, and her song When the Party’s Over entered the top 40.
She started going on tour in 2018, and by this point, she had 74.7M Instagram followers and 52M monthly listeners.
In 2019, she released her second album, When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? After this album, she broke a world record for being the youngest woman at Number 1 on the UK album charts. At the same time, she also had the most US Hot 100 entries by a female.
She also performed at Coachella in 2019.
In 2020, she attended the Grammys. She then became the first artist to win all four major categories: Best New Artist, Song of the Year, Record of the Year, and Best Pop Vocal Album. She was also the youngest to win these awards (18).
By 2021, she had performed over 450 concerts at 19 years old.
In 2021, she released another album, Happier Than Ever, and launched her fragrance line the same year.
In 2022, she had her first World Tour.
In 2023, she wrote the song What Was I Made For? for the “Barbie” movie. She won two more Grammys as well.
All of these successes have led her to now, the upcoming release of her new album.
The New Album
On April 8, Eilish announced on her Instagram that her album, HIT ME HARD AND SOFT, would be released on May 17.
Before her announcement, she put all her fans on her close friends on her Instagram story and posted teasers for the album.
In this post, she announced that she will not be releasing any singles before the album. She tells her fans, “I wanna give it to you all at once.”
In the same post, she said in her caption, “Finneas and I truly could not be more proud of this album and we absolutely can’t wait for you to hear it.”
When talking about the new album title, she told the press, “The album does exactly as the title suggests: hits you hard and soft both lyrically and sonically while bending genres and defying trends along the way.”
Eilish is a big advocate for sustainability, and throughout her entire career, she has tried her best to be as sustainable as possible.
For example, for her tour in 2022, she partnered with REVERB. REVERB is a nonprofit that addresses environmental concerns within the music industry.
She also used partially zero-emissions battery systems to set up a temporary “solar farm” during her 2023 Lollapalooza set.
For this album, Eilish is continuing to stay sustainable. She will release a limited number of physical copies on the release day, and they will also be made from 100% recycled materials.
She did this same thing for her previous album, Happier Than Ever.
Eilish will also make one version of vinyl rather than multiple versions of the same album to avoid waste. She is continuing to give her fans content and grow as an artist. She is extremely successful, and she will continue to succeed.
The countdown to this release starts now.