She has also set an intention to stay offline when she gets that all-too-common itch to plummet into a bottomless pit of handheld despair. Eilish deleted the social media apps from her phone at the start of the summer and replaced them with games. She’ll still post sometimes, but she no longer has access to her account on her phone, which has left her at times blissfully ignorant, including to her own record-shattering successes. She’ll get a text that the album’s gone platinum, or that she’s the most streamed artist in the entire world on Spotify. “That’s all of music,” she says, like she still can’t believe it. “That’s literally all of the music in the world.” (And over 105 million monthly listeners on Spotify, to be precise.)
The key, she says, is the balance between the desired intimacy of her private life and the enormity of her public persona. “Over time, I think I’ve made a really good mixture,” she says, “making sure I feel like myself, and I’m not only being satisfied by the external validation.” For many years, the audience reaction was the only thing that mattered. “If I was happy in my life, it was because people loved me on the internet. And if I was upset in my life, it was usually because people didn’t.” The loudest criticisms tended to focus on her physical presentation: When she posted a photograph of herself wearing a swimsuit on vacation, the blowback made Fox News; when she experimented with more traditionally feminine attire for photo shoots or the Met Gala, she had to put out her own version of a press release. (“I spent the first five years of my career getting absolutely obliterated by you fools for being boyish and dressing how I did & constantly being told I’d be hotter if I acted like a woman,” Eilish wrote on Instagram in May 2023. “Now when I feel comfortable enough to wear anything remotely feminine or fitting, I changed and am a sellout.”) “I’ve learned to not base my life around that,” she says now. She’s not totally offline, of course, or by any means impervious to outside opinion. (Find a 22-year-old who is.) But she’s got some distance from it; an investment in the parts of her life you can’t necessarily see within the massive frame of her fame, a playfulness and a sense that she doesn’t need to take herself quite so seriously.
“I’m excited to see her enjoying it,” Baird tells me later, “that she’s doing things like going out to a restaurant…. There are many levels of fame, and many different times in fame. There are periods where you can’t step outside your door, and then there are periods where you just have a little bit of grace, and taking advantage of those moments is really wonderful.” In the weeks after we meet, Eilish is spotted in the audience at a Clairo concert at the Fonda Theatre in LA wearing a basketball jersey that says “EILISH” on the back. There is an ease to her in public that feels new, an adult embrace of the world, rather than viewing it from a protective crouch.
Speaking of seizing a moment: “Guess” came about after Charli XCX and her manager suggested the collaboration that would eventually end up on the remix-heavy second edition of Charli XCX’s Brat. “I was so inspired,” Eilish says. The result, a seductive whisper verse on a bawdy club banger, was a clear departure from Eilish’s typical warble and croon, and quickly took the internet (and charts) by storm during what by then had already been dubbed “brat summer.” It’s a fun song, sweaty, provocative, unapologetically horny, and deeply tongue-in-cheek. In the music video, Eilish blithely drives a bulldozer through a wall and, with her strutting costar, summits a
mountain of underwear.
It feels like a furthering of something Eilish started with her earlier summer hit, “Lunch” (sample lyric: “I could eat that girl for lunch.… It’s a craving, not a crush”). While her prior albums used her instrument to plumb the depths of the human experience, this one seems happy to sonically skim along closer to the surface, playing with pop structures and her own psychology in equal measure. It just feels lighter, even if the actual messaging isn’t; it also appears that she’s no longer playing a character. “You know, the big challenge when you’re on your third full-length record is trying not to repeat yourself,” Finneas tells me, noting that it took a year to write Hit Me Hard and Soft. “The thing that was really important to me was really pushing Billie to be honest,” he says. As a result, the bouncy tracks are met by songs like “The Greatest” (“And you don’t wanna know / How alone I’ve been / Let you come and go / Whatever state I’m in”) and “Wildflower” (“Things fall apart and time breaks your heart / I wasn’t there, but I know / She was your girl, you showed her the world / You fell out of love and you both let go”). These songs, Finneas tells me, “are like confessions.”