In the intimate confessional no one can hear you scream

Being the patron saint for girls going through adolescence, Billie Eilish knows that loud doesn't always mean powerful.These days, she's never been more quiet

- Nadine Smith

At 22 years old, Billie Eilish is more accomplished than most artists twice her age: a nine-time Grammy winner and two-time Oscar winner, she's also the youngest artist to ever headline both Coachella and Glastonbury. Her songs have generated over 76 billion combined streams with more than 64 million monthly listeners on Spotify. Truly, the stats are mind-boggling.

Eilish’s lime green hair – now back to black after a brief foray into blonde – has achieved cult status for a certain generation. Amid her stratospheric rise, Eilish has become a patron saint for girls going through it. Across two, now three, albums, she is completely herself: casually and nonchalantly. Whispering confessions of existential dread and bone-deep insecurity in your ear, she’s the adolescent confidant you never had.

Her new album, Hit Me Hard and Soft, which is out today, has been almost universally praised in the press; in this edition’s review, The Independent waxes lyrical about its “shifting mix of sleepy guitars, sighing cellos, and trancey beats”. But regardless of how the album was going to be received by critics, there’s no doubt it was always going to hit a million young girls right in the feels.

Like previous generations of female singer-songwriters who scrambled the sacred and the profane, from Madonna to Kate Bush to Alanis Morrissette, Eilish lives and dies on the thin line between the whimsical and the terrifying. Her songwriting envelops the whole gamut of emotion – because existing as a woman today is a shifting experience: slapstick comedy in one moment, body horror in the next, and a post-apocalyptic fairytale all at the same time.