Hit Me Hard and Soft

Eilish co-wrote the album with Finneas O'Connell, who produced it. They began forming ideas in December 2021, and in an Apple Music interview she said she hoped to start writing in 2023. In December 2023 she said on The Tonight Show that it was almost done, and three months later she confirmed it was mastered. Early sessions worked from unfinished song fragments that were later revisited and developed, which was new for them, and she said the record pushed her vocally further than any before it. The cover photograph, by William Drumm, shows her falling through a door frame into dark blue water. The shoot took six hours, with her repeatedly submerged for two minutes at a time.

Alexis Petridis of the Guardian described Chihiro as having "a muted, mid-tempo house pulse" and said that midway through the album shifts focus, with songs becoming "longer and more wilfully episodic". L'Amour de Ma Vie turns midway into a dance section titled Over Now, The Diner is narrated in the role of a stalker, and Bittersuite bridges into Blue. Blue reuses lines from earlier songs, among them "a bird in a cage" from Skinny and the title line of Birds of a Feather. Its first section was inspired by an unreleased track, True Blue.

Lunch came out with the album as its lead single, with a video directed by Eilish. She had previewed Lunch, L'Amour de Ma Vie and Chihiro in a surprise DJ set at Coachella on 13 April 2024. Birds of a Feather went to US radio as the second single on 18 June, and Wildflower followed as the fourth on 4 March 2025.

Reception

Metacritic gave the album 89 out of 100 from 22 critic scores. The standfirst of Hannah Jocelyn's Pitchfork review ends: "It’s an honest and ambitious album when it’s not inert and repetitive." The Guardian's headline called her still the great outlier of American pop, and NME's Thomas Smith headed his review "bold, brilliant and bright". Amanda Petrusich of The New Yorker wrote that much of the record is about wanting a relationship but failing to sustain closeness with another person. It debuted at number two on the Billboard 200 with 339,000 units, and number one in the UK, where it was certified double Platinum. All ten tracks debuted in the top 40 of the Hot 100, and it finished as the fifth best-selling album of 2024 in the US.