“People say I look happy / Just because I got skinny,” Billie Eilish sings in “Skinny,” the lead track off her new album, Hit Me Hard and Soft. “But the old me is still me / And maybe the real me / And I think she’s pretty.”
Are we entering a new era of Eilish? The singer-songwriter may only be 22 years old, but her 22 is not just anybody’s 22. She is, after all, a performer whose breakthrough work came out before she even graduated from high school. At the age when most people are finishing college, she has (with her brother and collaborator Finneas O’Connell) claimed nine Grammys and two Academy Awards.
In her macabre debut, 2019’s When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?, Eilish’s most sincere moments were overshadowed by her villainous alt-pop persona. In her sophomore LP, 2021’s Happier Than Ever, the edgy teen phenom had been poked, prodded, and surveilled into a more subdued songstress. Although she confronted music-industry predators in “Your Power” (from the second album), it was with painstakingly hushed condemnations: “Will you only feel bad when they find out?”
Perhaps no genre of her evolution has attracted more attention than her shifting attitude toward her body. Known initially for her baggy, tomboy apparel, in 2020 she appeared on the cover of British Vogue in an Alexander McQueen corset and other high-femme finery, in part to prove to body-shamers that she could pull it off. “If I wear what is comfortable, I am not a woman,” she recited coldly in the spoken-word video “Not My Responsibility” from the same year, her voice lingering a decibel below a whisper. “If I shed the layers, I’m a slut. Is my value based only on your perception? Or is your opinion of me not my responsibility?”
But in Hit Me, Eilish rips off the psychic bodice and noticeably cranks up the volume in her vocals, as well as her own desires. After inadvertently coming out as bisexual in a 2023 interview with Variety—“Wasn’t it obvious?” she later stated—she gets giddily explicit about her attraction to women on the slinky pop track “Lunch.” In the music video, she reverts back to her skater-boy steez, cocking her baseball cap to the side and cheekily wedging a cherry between her lips. “I could eat that girl for lunch / Yeah, she dances on my tongue / Tastes like she might be the one,” she sings.
It’s no coincidence that Eilish is learning what it is to love women as she comes around to loving her own body. In the classic feminist text Our Bodies, Ourselves, the authors urged women of yesteryear to do body-affirming mirror exercises and relish their physical forms like unique works of art. In a 2024 interview with Rolling Stone, Billie extolled the virtues of her own lustier version of the exercise: making love to herself in front of a mirror. This way, her body is no longer an adversary nor a receptacle of shame; her body is more like a friend she’s getting to know better.
“I can’t stress it enough, as somebody with extreme body issues and dysmorphia that I’ve had my entire life,” Eilish told Rolling Stone. “I have learned that looking at myself and watching myself feel pleasure has been an extreme help in loving myself and accepting myself, and feeling empowered and comfortable.”
Hit Me arrives the same year that Tracy Chapman and Boygenius made headlines at the Grammys and Reneé Rapp and Chappell Roan stole hearts with their bubblegum-flavored lesbian anthems at Coachella. Eilish’s contribution to the queer-pop-girlie canon is a delicious prelude to a lusty, unapologetic sapphic pop summer.
This effervescent new wave of queer pop—which implores fans to connect with their bodies through dance, dress, and sex—has become more politically urgent than ever. Eilish lambasted the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade onstage at the Glastonbury Festival in 2022: “Today is a really, really dark day for women in the US,” she told the crowd in the UK. And with the prevalence of image-based social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok, young Americans report feeling lonelier and more unsettled in their bodies than ever before. In a study cited by Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, 46% of adolescents aged 13 to 17 report that social media makes them feel worse about themselves. Public-health experts at Harvard have also correlated chronic social media use with symptoms of body dysmorphia, eating disorders, and suicidal ideation in youth.
But what Eilish imparts in her new songs is a lesson that not only women nor LGBTQ people can appreciate: In learning how to be a loving partner to your body, your true empowerment can begin.
