Billie Eilish insists that Hit Me Hard and Soft is properly experienced as an album, which itself comes across a radical artistic statement in this era of songs scattered to the Spotify winds. Eschewing the practice of dribbling out advance tracks for months leading up to an album’s release, Eilish held everything back until the entire package landed. It even has a total runtime of just under forty-four minutes, putting its length right in the sweet spot familiar to those whose only recourse to memorize an artist’s new release centered on repeatedly flipping a vinyl slab and fitting it over the spindle on a bedroom turntable.

The sense that Hit Me Hard and Soft is a contained, cohesive statement is helped by the sense that Eilish crafts her lyrics with uncommon openness. As opposed to the cutesy, guess-who puzzle boxes offered up by Taylor Swift or the set-in-steel credos of Beyoncé, Eilish specializes in candid vulnerability that mirrors the anxieties of growing up in public that she’s confessed in interviews and on her own social media posts. The deft album opener “Skinny” is basically a retort to all the tabloid buzzing that irritated her that acknowledges the damage done: “Am I acting my age now?/ Am I already on the way out?/ When I step off the stage, I’m a bird in a cage/ I’m a dog in a dog pound.”

As before, Eilish collaborates on the album with her brother Finneas O’Connell, who is listed as the sole producer. The evident plan they set together is to craft a surprising and varied sonic landscape. The sinewy electronic pop of Eilish’s debut album is present as is the jazz-cooled sound of her sophomore outing, though both as linger echoes that inform rather than guide the material. Eilish is fine with reminding the listener where she’s been before, but she doesn’t want to linger there. At its most dizzying, the album can shift like a hypersensitive chameleon. The first half of “L’Amour de Ma Vie” is reminiscent of Candie Payne or other throwback pop acts, and then an EDM eddy takes over on the back half of the song, sounding that a chart-topper from the future. Across the album, Eilish journeys from the ghostly chanteuse mode of “Wildflower” to the lighter, lither Chvrches chiming of “Birds of a Feather” to the 8-bit carnival song “Bittersuite,” each different guise sitting as comfortably on her as one of the battalion of big, baggy sweatshirts she has stuffed in her closet.

“Lunch” is probably the track that’s been most rapturously received by Eilish’s fan base thus far, largely because it finds her pining after another girl (“I could buy her so much stuff/ It’s a craving, not a crush, huh”). It’s the frisky disco groove as much as the randy lyrics that makes it one of the clear standouts on the album. On the other side of the pulse rate spectrum, “The Greatest,” a rapturously delicate ballad that swells to a size meant to drench an arena in emotion (“Just wanted passion from you/ Just wanted what I gave you/ I waited/ And waited”).

Songs as strong as these stand alone just fine. Yet, there is something compelling about seeing them as necessarily bound to each other and all that surround them. As much as anyone else working in pop music right now, Eilish comes across as an artist who engages the creative process as a means of answering the question of who she is right now, finding the clearest way to express that answer, and shaving away anything that doesn’t honestly fulfill the brief. In a time of relentless pop product, Hit Me Hard and Soft is, thankfully, a statement instead.