Eilish has a different analogy to offer: “You ever see those videos of the big muscular dog with the harness on and it gets on the treadmill and they hook it up and it’s barking and squealing to start running?” No, but I get the picture. “That’s me, I’m the dog.” Onstage she jumps and thrashes and struts and skips. At the New York listening party for Hit Me Hard and Soft at Brooklyn’s Barclays Center in May, she darted around the smoke-filled stadium floor, breaking into a gallop when the beat picked up; the next night at the Kia Forum in Los Angeles, she romped the room with Shark on a leash. Later, I watch her dance in the sound booth to “Chihiro,” lifting Shark up under his armpits (he has the long-suffering patience of the genuinely adored canine) before running to the window to amp up the musicians, twisting her hips, both fists in the air. “I am literally sprinting all over the stage” when performing, she says. As a result, her tour looks prioritize flexibility over fashion. (The most important element is the sports bra, she says. Her preferred make and model is the Ultimate by Shefit, which she likens to a bulletproof vest—“for us girls with girls…it’s serious.”)
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 105million 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.”
Set against the breezy raunch of “Guess,” these present a more holistic, human vision of a young woman coming into her sexuality—an evolution that it wasn’t always clear Eilish would be able to experience in public. During the press cycle for “What Was I Made For?”, the Grammy- and Academy Award–winning song Eilish and Finneas wrote for Barbie, Eilish, who had split with the Neighbourhood frontman Jesse Rutherford six months prior, made headlines for describing to a Variety reporter how she related to girls. (“I love them so much. I love them as people. I’m attracted to them as people.”) Shortly after, another Variety reporter asked whether she’d intended to come out. “No, I didn’t,” Eilish responded at the time. “But I kind of thought, Wasn’t it obvious?”
But before she explicitly stakes out her position, and a little under two weeks before Eilish & Co. officially pile into their buses to hit the road, I get an audience-eye view of the Hit Me Hard and Soft tour during a private rehearsal. First it’s a view of the lobby of the practice space: Things are running behind, to the tune of a few hours. But hey, “Birds of a Feather” officially exceeded 1billion streams on Spotify alone today. And, as every college student knows, what is adulthood for if not setting your own schedule? Eilish, wearing a low ponytail, vintage New York Knicks tee, and red-and-white basketball shorts, has been in meetings and vocal warm-ups all afternoon. She has been deciding on the lighting, the cues, the lasers, the cadence of the pyrotechnics, what marks she’ll hit and when, all in service of the best possible experience for her audience. (As she told me earlier, “Pre-tour is just rehearsals, rehearsals, rehearsals like a motherfucker.”)
