What is the last really good song about eating box?

No, not Harry Styles’s “Watermelon Sugar,” the earworm bane of every easy listening-scored shopping experience. For me, I have to reach way back to those sleazy 1990s for some cunnilingus classics: Madonna’s “Where Life Begins” and Lil’ Kim’s “Not Tonight.” Yet, while Kim’s insistent chorus, “I don’t want dick tonight! Lick my pussy right!” shows listeners where her priorities lie (her own pleasure), it just doesn’t have the same thrill as hearing Billie Eilish’s dominant constant craving in her song “LUNCH” off of her recently released album HIT ME HARD AND SOFT:

“I could eat that girl for lunch
Yeah, she dances on my tongue
Tastes like she might be the one”

Oh, Happy Pride, Billie!

This is not to dismiss Kim’s pioneeringly raunchy lyrics; it’s just that “Not Tonight” is unsurprising within the context of her hip-hop sex kitten image, largely defined by that same 1996 album Hard Core. In contrast, Eilish’s music has always felt somewhat asexual, even with the (in)famous “Might seduce your dad type” line in “bad guy” off of her 2019 debut WHEN WE ALL FALL ASLEEP, WHERE DO WE GO? That lyric always felt woefully forced to me—Lolita doesn’t usually dress like Fieldy from Korn. Not so much with “LUNCH.” Of course, queer themes in pop songwriting are nothing new. Neither is queer baiting in 2024’s mainstream pop. Just check out some of the unhinged fan theories about secret lesbo Taylor Swift, some of which even managed to get published in the “paper of record.” Yet, what makes Billie’s bouncy, playful, almost B-52’s surf rock-twangy ode to muff-munching stand out is not the fact that it’s gay as hell, but that it comes off as wholly authentic. You feel Eilish’s compulsive urge to shower the object of her affection with luxury gifts. You can picture Eilish voyeuristically oogling her partner’s clear skin in the mirror, trapped like a deer in a speeding car’s headlights.

“LUNCH” isn’t yet another oh-so-tired pop song that asserts newfound maturity through a hypersexualized turn either, as so often happens with America’s child star sweethearts like Christina Aguilera’s greasy “Dirrty,” Miley’s tongue-wagging, and whatever the hell Jojo Siwa is trying to pull lately dressed as a “gay pop” Gene Simmons. Instead, the song is a genuine coming-of-age moment: the discovery of desire. As Eilish told Rolling Stone, “That song was actually part of what helped me become who I am, to be real, I wrote some of it before even doing anything with a girl, and then wrote the rest after. I’ve been in love with girls for my whole life, but I just didn’t understand — until, last year, I realized I wanted my face in a vagina.” Ok, honey!

It’s not just “LUNCH.” Sure, that track may be the album’s hook and lead single, a bold move especially when the much more bubblegum “BIRDS OF A FEATHER” is just two songs away (though “BIRDS OF A FEATHER” sneaks in some grim imagery like staying with a lover until you’re rotting in a grave and admiring compliments such as “You’re so full of shit,” which reminds me of Grimes’s tossed-in reference to taking a dump in her otherwise saccharine “Butterfly” on Art Angels). However, the entire new album is notably Eilish’s most mature to date, thematically, musically, and vocally with Eilish finally pushing her voice into full-chested, cathartic, emotional belts on songs like “THE GREATEST.” “Am I acting my age now?” Eilish asks in the opener “SKINNY,” a grower of a song that traces a number of insecurities, from the Ozempic era’s equating happiness with thinness, mean assholes on the Internet, and being trapped like “a bird in a cage” by celebrity, before soaring into dramatic, cinematic strings.

Is Billie acting her age? It’s hard to say since there are many older musicians (I won’t name names) who haven’t reached this level of assuredness in themselves and their talent that allows them to experiment with some of the stranger ends of pop like Eilish does here at just 22. HIT ME HARD AND SOFT is a perfectly curated ten-song trip through lovesick fixation to heartbreak and resolution that is both achingly vulnerable and boastingly confident in equal measure. While Eilish’s songwriting firmly plunks listeners beside her whether fixating on a partner’s former leather-wearing girlfriend in “WILDFLOWER” or begging for more passion while waiting around for her partner to want to see her naked in “THE GREATEST,” always while leaving room for ambivalence about these relationships and needs, the album, at least to me, is even more remarkable because it is exhilaratingly perplexing sonically.

Perhaps the most immediately noticeable is its production, yet again by Eilish’s older brother and collaborator FINNEAS. The album’s production is dense, with layers of not only electronica colliding with orchestras alongside conventional guitar, bass, and drums, but Eilish’s intermittent hums, moans, sighs, and whispers. Not all of these whispers are discernable like the hushed tones underlying the heavy synth drones at the very end of “BITTERSUITE.” Yet some are, such as the slyly recited phone number that concludes “THE DINER,” an obsessive anthem from the perspective of her own stalker. When called (and I did), this number leads to a startling recording of Eilish picking up, saying, “Hello? HELLOO! I can’t hear you!” Who is the creeper now?!

The album’s rich production is even more notable in contrast to the rash of wan production that has afflicted pop music in the last decade, mostly by the main offender, Jack Antonoff (St. Vincent’s excellent new self-produced album All Born Screaming also reveals what we’ve been missing). While Antonoff’s clarity works on occasion like for Lana Del Rey’s Laurel Canyon romanticism, it’s refreshing for a woman singer like Eilish to not only go big but fully immersive. Songs like “BITTERSUITE,” with its howling descent into muffled vocals, give the feeling as if you’re being submerged, echoing Eilish’s drowned dunk tank album cover.

My favorite part of HIT ME HARD AND SOFT, though, and what has kept me listening to the album on repeat since its release, is that it unfolds as a series of surprises. I never know where the fuck Eilish is going. Songs shift and switch midstream, lulling the listener into a false sense of melodic security before veering off into something else. “CHIHIRO”’s jumping bass groove launches into a 90s dance spin, an ecstatically sexy throwback to Madonna’s “Deeper and Deeper” off of Erotica. It’s just missing Udo Kier in the music video! The plucky Lily Allen-esque opening of “L’AMOUR DE MA VIE,” with its semi-snotty lyrics, “I wish you the best for the rest of your life…I need to confess, I told you a lie. I said you, you were the love of my life,” becomes, after a glitching repeated, “Then you moved on…,” a screaming hyperpop club manic episode that could fit comfortably on Charli xcx’s new critical darling album Brat. Then, there are the two closers—“BITTERSUITE” and “BLUE”—both of which slam multiple songs into one. This comes off as beguiling rather than a mess, certainly a risk when merging grating electronica into pumping bossa nova and back again or dropping the sudden surprise of Eilish’s voice pitched down like a man’s.

I don’t make all those references to other musicians for my own enjoyment (not entirely anyway). HIT ME HARD AND SOFT pulls from an astonishingly diverse range of musical sources. I hear David Bowie in the abrupt sonic shifts à la “Station to Station,” the “Space Oddity” guitar strumming intro of “WILDFLOWER,” and the midsection of “BLUE” (“You were born bluer than a butterfly, beautiful and so deprived of oxygen”) that seems to directly interpolate “Quicksand” (yet another aural submersion). “BLUE” also contains a jolt of piercing and slicing sound effects that remind me of Xiu Xiu’s “A Knife in the Sun” from Angel Guts: Red Classroom. Hell, Eilish even goes full Juggalette with the Insane Clown Possie-ish carnival in “THE DINER.” And, though Lana Del Rey has and will always loom large as Eilish’s preeminent filth elder, beginning with her first viral hit, “Ocean Eyes,” the similarities here mostly end with the song titles (“The Greatest” also being a Lana Del Rey song) and a lyrical fixation with the color blue. Looking beyond Lana, the closest contemporary pop companion I see to HIT ME HARD AND SOFT is The Weeknd, particularly his decadent synth-driven purgatories for sad famous douchebags constructed in After Hours and Dawn FM. In fact, the beginning of “BITTERSUITE” could seamlessly slide right into Dawn FM next to “Every Angel is Terrifying.”

Even with so many resonances, HIT ME HARD AND SOFT somehow doesn’t come off as derivative. Eilish balances these influences with her own unique sound—that ASMR vocal control and staccato beat. Granted her previous album, 2021’s Happier Than Ever, also expanded her range, but with sixteen songs, even despite standout runs like “Oxytocin” into “GOLDWING” and the trio of “NDA,” “Therefore I Am,” and the title track, that album is undeniably bloated. So much so that it drags by the end and I almost always abandon a full listen before the title song’s big finish. In contrast, HIT ME HARD AND SOFT is not only mercifully concise in today’s landscape of exhaustingly long pop albums, but it’s also a well-conceived cohesive whole. This is audible in the last two songs, which fracture, repeating imagery, lyrics, and melodies from other songs. “BLUE” yanks the line about “bird in a cage” back from the opening “SKINNY.” Both “BITTERSUITE” and “BLUE” namecheck earlier titles like “L’AMOUR DE MA VIE” and “BIRDS OF A FEATHER.” Repeating lyrics is nothing new for Eilish either, which she did on WHEN WE ALL FALL ASLEEP, WHERE DO WE GO? with much less success. The final song on that album, “goodbye,” features a chorus of Billies that hits rewind by revisiting lyrics from all the songs in reverse order. This comes off as on the nose and gimmicky. On HIT ME HARD AND SOFT, however, the repeated moments are haunting, providing a heavy dose of eerie déjà-vu. This is further emphasized by perhaps the most rewarding moment on the album: “BLUE” concludes with a string section, similar to the one on “SKINNY,” that, instead, reiterates the vocal melody from “THE GREATEST” (“I love you and I still do, just wanted passion from you. Just wanted what I gave you”). It’s as if the album turns completely in on itself with the cried desperation from “THE GREATEST” now existing beyond words.

Granted, I’m a sucker for this type of songwriting. While not exactly complicated, it asserts an album as a full listening experience—a piece of art—rather than a bunch of streaming tracks cobbled together. And Eilish is well aware of the pressure she’s under to churn out those hits. After a quiet pause, post-strings on “BLUE,” she returns with her more forceful speaking voice to insist: “But when can I hear the next one?” While this is a much-deserved critique of the endless demand to produce content that gets used up and forgotten almost immediately, selfishly, given HIT ME HARD AND SOFT‘s pop perfection, Billie can count me as one of those bothersome, slobbering fanatics (im)patiently waiting for the next one too.