An Accidental Billie Eilish Hit
Billie Eilish came into the rollout for her third album, Hit Me Hard and Soft, with plenty of trust from her label, thanks to a trophy case full of Grammys and Oscars and her previous full-lengths topping the charts. And Eilish knew exactly how she wanted to use that trust — by forgoing the typical music-industry rule of releasing advance singles for a new record. “Every single time an artist I love puts out a single without the context of the album, I’m just already prone to hating on it,” Eilish told Rolling Stone. A press release further touted Hard and Soft as something “ideally listened to in its entirety from beginning to end.” Since Beyoncé’s surprise self-titled drop in 2013, more artists have started doing this, with labels amenable to losing out on early buzz in hopes an album will have a longer tail. (No one has used this more to her advantage than Taylor Swift, who hasn’t pre-issued a single since 2019.) But even the biggest stars eventually need to give the label a track to promote on radio to help them stay on the charts.
Eilish played along and readied “Lunch” as a post-release single for Hard and Soft, debuting the video 12 hours after the album’s midnight release. As much as she wanted fans to hear her new record in full, “Lunch” seemed like the track that could stand on its own, with a thumping lo-fi beat recalling “bad guy” and buzzy lyrics about her queer identity. At first, it did: “Lunch” immediately rocketed to No. 5 on the Hot 100. It seemed like momentum on streaming and radio could carry it further, but by the following week, “Lunch” had fallen five spots. A small skid after an album’s release isn’t out of the ordinary — Hard and Soft’s next-highest entry, “Chihiro,” fell from No. 12 to 16. But here’s the weird part: Another song, the non-single “Birds of a Feather,” was still holding strong, rising from No. 13 to 12. Three weeks after the album’s release, “Feather” took the lead, at No. 11, even after Eilish dropped a “Chihiro” music video.
What was happening here? Well, fans had listened to Hard and Soft all the way through, just as Eilish wanted, and then latched on to their own favorite song. Instead of “Lunch,” “Feather” immediately blew up on TikTok after the album came out, soundtracking fans’ clips about their best friends and partners. It’s easy to hear why they loved it: The glossy, gliding beat and grimly romantic lyrics (“I want you to stay / Till I’m in the grave / Till I rot away, dead and buried”) sound like a direct evolution from Eilish’s debut, When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?
It’s hard to imagine a label ever picking such a vulnerable, low-key song as a lead single, especially to compete against one of the most carefree slates of summer music in recent years. But the choice isn’t always on them. Thanks to streaming and TikTok, fans today have more power than ever to push what they like up the charts, thereby forcing the label’s hand. When singer-songwriter Zach Bryan released a self-titled album with no advanced songs last year, fans flocked to his Kacey Musgraves duet, “I Remember Everything,” propelling it to No. 1. TikTok campaigns helped former fan-friendly deep cuts like the Weeknd’s 2016 song “Die for You” and Swift’s 2019 track “Cruel Summer” hit No. 1 in 2023.
The difference with Eilish was that her label was trying to make “Lunch” happen as a single while fans were rallying around “Feather.” As “Feather” simmered in the low teens of the Hot 100, “Lunch” was still rising at radio, showing that some — maybe the label, maybe radio, but probably both — were still reluctant to see “Feather” as a hit. Once it finally broke through on radio, in early July, it rose quickly, passing “Lunch” by August. That seemed to get everyone on Eilish’s team behind it. She ended up performing “Feather” at the Olympics Closing Ceremony earlier this month, spiking sales to send it to No. 5 this week — an especially impressive feat for a song that still doesn’t have a music video.
Things may not have turned out how Team Billie and Interscope expected them to at first. But in this fast-paced music landscape, a slow burn is more powerful than a high debut. Ariana Grande’s “we can’t be friends (wait for your love)” debuted at No. 1 when she released it in March, but the song only went down from there — by late April, it was already out of the top ten (this week, it’s at No. 42). Same for Swift’s “Fortnight,” which spent its first two weeks at No. 1 in April before falling out of the top ten in June and out of the top 40 this week. “Feather,” meanwhile, is poised to have a similar chart run to Sabrina Carpenter’s “Espresso,” which debuted at No. 7 in April and has simmered in the top ten ever since (it’s at No. 4 this week), or Shaboozey’s “A Bar Song (Tipsy),” which debuted at No. 36 in late April and is now finishing its sixth week at No. 1.
It’s hard to say whether “Lunch” would’ve been more successful if it was released ahead of the album, but it hardly matters now that “Feather” is having such a good run (which could get a bump in the coming weeks from an eventual music video). In the end, everyone got what they wanted: Eilish had her no-singles rollout, the label got its big post-release single, and the fans got their favorite song near the top of the charts — and showed the label that they know best.
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