The star earned her highest-ever week of equivalent album units, but ‘Hit Me Hard and Soft’ was her first album to not debut at Number One
Although she didn’t end up topping the charts, Billie Eilish just earned her biggest week ever on the Billboard Top 200. Hit Me Hard and Soft landed on Number Two on the charts this week, just behind Taylor Swift’s Tortured Poets Department.
According to Billboard, Eilish’s 339,000 equivalent album units is the highest in her career, including nearly 200,000 album sales, also a career peak for the 22 year-old singer. This is Eilish’s first studio album to not debut at Number One, due to the record-setting numbers from Swift’s latest release. (Each of Eilish’s previous records — 2017’s When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? and 2021’s Happier Than Ever — debuted on top of the charts.)
Eilish’s third LP is an expansive record that incorporates both traditional pop string instrumentation and dance-y synth beats. “I feel like this album is me,” Eilish told Rolling Stone in last month’s cover story. “It’s not a character…It feels like my youth and who I was as a kid.”
Eilish eschewed the traditional promotional plan of releasing any singles or tracks from Hit Me Hard and Soft before the record was released in mid-May, not wanting any one song to speak for itself without being heard in the full context of her album. “This album is like a family,” she told Rolling Stone. “I don’t want one little kid to be in the middle of the room alone.” It’s one of several reasons why both Eilish and her brother Finneas, who produced the record, have referred to their latest collaboration as “an album-ass-album.”
Eilish landing at Number Two this time around has less to do with the her new album’s popularity and more to do with the record-breaking numbers of Swift’s Tortured Poets Department, which is now the first album to spend at least five weeks at Number One since Morgan Wallen achieved that feat last year with One Thing At a Time.