A few songs into the first night of Hit Me Hard and Soft: The Tour at the Videotron Center in Quebec City, Billie Eilish challenged the sold-out crowd of 18,000 to play the quiet game. “It’s literally the only time in the entire show I’m going to say this,” assured the superstar, 22, who sat cross-legged on the floor at center stage, “because I don’t want silence, ever.”
But there was a practical reason for the request: Eilish was about to record looped layers of her voice, so she could harmonize with herself while singing her hushed early hit “When the Party’s Over.” “I love doing my own vocal production,” she told the obliging audience, “and I thought I would bring that to the stage.”
“I love you!” cried an ecstatic fan, who was promptly shushed by the entire arena.
As Eilish built a lush bed of backing oohs and ahhs layer by layer, this hypnotic moment served a few purposes. It was a casual way to prove that she was singing live, and a clever means of bringing the intimacy of the bedroom recording studio — a fabled setting in the mythology of Eilish and her brother, the producer Finneas — to a massive, buzzing arena.
But it was also a canny way to replicate a quintessential element of Eilish’s recordings — a whispery, ASMR-inducing hush — that can be difficult to evoke on an arena stage, where impassioned fans obscure the nuances of her voice by screaming every lyric back to her.
Both ends of the dynamic spectrum are important to Eilish’s sound, a fact she underscores in the title of her adventurous third album, “Hit Me Hard and Soft.” In this accompanying live show, she modulated them expertly, suddenly transforming acoustic numbers into arena-rocking power ballads and playing the adoring audience like a well-tuned instrument.
The spectacular staging, too, was responsive to the ever-changing moods of Eilish’s music. After ascending atop a luminescent cube in the center of the venue, Eilish spent most of the show bopping, prowling and sprinting around a rectangular stage elevated off the center of the floor. The platform was rimmed with lights and lasers that created vibrantly hued effects or, when a song called for something simpler, a minimalist atmosphere that allowed Eilish’s kinetic charisma to illuminate the arena.
For Eilish, who has spent the past half decade racking up accolades and experiences, it was an evening of firsts: She hadn’t yet played most of these songs for a live audience, and she’d never performed in Quebec City. It was also, as she admitted to the crowd before her final song, the only concert she had ever played (“in my life!”) without her brother, close collaborator and “best friend in the world” Finneas, who is usually a presence in her live band but will only join Eilish on a few dates of this tour, as he embarks upon a set of solo shows.
Eilish did, however, have some reinforcements from home: Her backing vocalists are two neighbors she has been singing with since her tween years, Ava and, Eilish quipped, “her hot older sister,” Jane Horner. She brought them center stage to accompany her on a sparse rendition of her 2021 ballad “Male Fantasy” and a more muscular arrangement of the new album’s candid opener, “Skinny.”
“Hit Me Hard and Soft” is a prolonged profession of queer desire, the first collection of love (and lust) songs Eilish has written explicitly about women. The album’s lead single, “Lunch,” was an early highlight in the set, as Eilish bounced around the stage, buoyed by a rubbery bass line, leading a hockey arena full of mostly young women in singing, “She dances on my tongue, tastes like she might be the one.”
Eilish wore a playful variation on her signature figure-obscuring silhouette: an oversized red athletic jersey, kneepads and tight, lacy, lingerie-like bicycle shorts that, she complained at one point, were giving her an awful wedgie. She often looked like a one-woman team, number emblazoned on her back, commanding an entire arena on her own.
In the crowd, the two hottest accessories of the night were reusable water bottles (Eilish, who played a video about her tour’s sustainability initiatives before her set, encourages fans to bring their own and hydrate at filling stations around the venue) and bandannas, which fans wore tied around their heads as Eilish often does. One of the most striking signs of her considerable cultural power is her ability to compel legions of teenage girls to spend a night out dressed like David Foster Wallace.
Though Eilish’s wattage did not exactly dim after the release of her muted and uncompromising 2021 sophomore album “Happier Than Ever,” her fans seem especially connected to the material from her latest album. (The crowd also became electric when she performed her verse of “Guess,” a recent, risqué Charli XCX remix. The latticework of lasers, naturally, turned “Brat” green.) Eilish’s energy amped up for songs from “Hit Me Hard and Soft”; during some of the older material, like her breakout hit “Bad Guy,” she entertained herself by filming with a Go-Pro-like camera connected to the arena’s screens, as though she was directing a tour diary in real time.
Though best known for her vaporous, fluttery vocal stylings, some of the most thrilling moments on “Hit Me Hard and Soft” call for Eilish to belt from a deeper register, like “The Greatest,” a clear live highlight: Eilish delivered its climactic sequence on a platform floating above the stage, head thrown back with full theatricality. One of the new album’s fan favorites, the plaintive “Wildflower,” bloomed into a call-and-response singalong. Even the album’s most out-of-left-field moment, the electro-pop coda to the slinky kiss-off “L’Amour de Ma Vie” made more sense live, as wild experimentations with Auto-Tune reflected the angst of a relationship gone sour.
Late in the set, having flung off her bandanna, Eilish spent the more subdued first half of “L’Amour de Ma Vie” fiddling with her thick black hair, which was gathered messily into two low pigtail buns. Before launching into the next song — her poignant “Barbie” ballad “What Was I Made For?,” which made her the youngest person ever to win two Oscars — Eilish revealed the source of her trouble: She was trying to take her hair ties out, but they were knotted into her mane. “No one’s going to be able to untie it,” she said. It became another audience challenge: “Somebody try it.”
It is difficult to imagine another pop superstar allowing herself to be seen in a state of dishevelment, let alone hopping down into the crowd to be handled by fans. It was a display of the seemingly spontaneous intimacy Eilish can create, no matter how large the stage. For a fleeting, giggly moment, as willing pairs of hands jutted out to assist, Eilish was not a stratospherically famous icon but simply a friend on the sofa.
As she detangled, one fan instinctively apologized for pulling her idol’s hair. “No, it’s OK,” Eilish said with a laugh. “You gotta do what you gotta do.”
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