The first half of 2024 will be remembered as a period when the music scene was flooded with a wave of new releases from popular female artists. Billie Eilish’s third album, Hit Me Hard and Soft, marked the end of this parade before the arrival of the summer season. The album debuted at No. 2 on the Billboard 200 for the week of June 1, recording more than 340,000 copies sold. This is a new weekly sales record for Billie Eilish herself, and it naturally places Hit Me Hard and Soft next to Taylor Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department and Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter. These three albums are more than enough to be called 2024’s Big Three, even if you don’t narrow it down to female artists.

However, to use a movie analogy, Hit Me Hard and Soft is not the third blockbuster succeeding Barbie and Oppenheimer. Unlike Beyoncé, who uses entertainment as a medium to engage in a discourse on history and culture, or Taylor Swift, who encapsulates a life that has become almost unbelievably grand through metaphors and allusions, Billie Eilish refines familiar themes and sounds from her debut. The adventurous-yet-mature ten-track album seems unusually short but is concise with nothing left to weigh it down.

In an interview with Stephen Colbert, Billie Eilish reveals that after her first album, she felt trapped by what people expected of her and that Happier Than Ever was a reaction to that, and was born out of a need to show that she could do what she wanted to do and that she was as multifaceted as anyone else. On the other hand, she admits that Hit Me Hard and Soft is the first genuine album in her creative life in terms of music and visuals. This is reflected in an interview with Rolling Stone, where she says, “I feel like this album is me. It’s not a character.”

In the same interview, Billie Eilish explains the album’s title as follows: “I thought it was such a perfect encapsulation of what this album does… I’m a pretty extremist person, and I really like when things are really intense physically, but I also love when things are very tender and sweet. I want two things at once. So I thought that was a really good way to describe me, and I love that it’s not possible.” In short, the theme of Hit Me Hard and Soft is Billie Eilish herself. A cohesive work that reflects on oneself cannot be one or two singles, which makes it only natural that the album came out without any pre-released singles despite its existence being announced in advance.

Perhaps this approach was possible because Billie Eilish is a 22-year-old on her third album, unlike Beyoncé or Taylor Swift. In other words, some lucky, brilliant, young artists find themselves in the right place at the right time to produce dialectical work. But not all artists do, so what’s the difference? Billie Eilish is a twenty-two-year-old living in 2024. She is a young star who symbolizes a new generation of artists who have secured creative self-determination from the very beginning of their careers. What’s more, with her unique creative structure where she oversees all aspects of songwriting and production with her brother Finneas, one can assume that this change will take place at a much higher density.

Interestingly, the direction of change is not toward the rejection or fusion of the past, but toward a better pop album. Billie Eilish has a debut album that is ranked as the 30th-best album of all time on Apple Music. Her voice is recognized as aesthetically complete. That perfection isn’t in the bizarre visuals with a front, or the use of extreme bass rare in pop, but in Billie Eilish’s voice itself, as “Ocean Eyes” proved nearly a decade ago. When Lana Del Rey brought her out as a surprise guest at this year’s Coachella and introduced her as the “voice of our generation,” it wasn’t just rhetoric.

So, the criticism that this album could have leaned toward “harder” amid the balance of “hard” and “soft” seems unfocused. Would more bangers like “Lunch” and quicker and longer transitions to dance sounds on a few tracks make an album better? Once you strip away generational labels like “neo-goth,” even her debut album reveals a greater value in her qualities as a classic pop vocalist. Working on movie scores that have won her two Oscars was not an affair, but was closer to her essence. She did not need an album to make the case for it like she did with Happier Than Ever. In the end, Hit Me Hard and Soft feels less like an album and more like the perfection of her way of making music. As Finneas once said, “I’m so much happier than when I hear a great song, when you’re like, ‘Oh, wow, I get to cook my whole dinner listening to this album.’”