Reviews of Billie Eilish’s extraordinary Hit Me Hard and Soft have, not surprisingly, underscored the singer’s embrace of her bisexuality (the album’s first single, “Lunch,” is a tongue-in-cheek ode to, well, putting her tongue where she wants). Both the 22-year-old’s sense of style and dry, clipped vocal delivery are at times reminiscent of another queer trailblazer, Ani DiFranco, whose fierce independence helped carve a path for “outsider pop” artists like Eilish—and who also has a new album out this week.
Unlike Eilish’s latest, Unprecedented Sh!t is less interested in interpersonal relationships than the sociopolitical conditions surrounding them. On “Virus,” DiFranco examines her guilt about how Covid affected her (“I was so deeply pleased to pause this life/I think I jinxed the world and caused this strife”) and acknowledges the ways in which we silo ourselves from each other (“I just keep listening to my own voice/In the echo chamber of my choice”).
This is DiFranco’s first album in over a decade to feature a co-producer, BJ Burton, and the result is her most musically varied set in years. Tracks like “Spinning Room” feature copious loops, distorted guitars, and vocal effects, while the crunchy “Virus” and the electrifying “Baby Roe” find DiFranco rocking out in ways she hasn’t since the ’90s. The lumbering cadence of the title track effectively embodies the exhaustion of living life in “unprecedented times.”
DiFranco continues to lean on platitudes in a manner she avoided earlier in her career, speaking in increasingly broad terms about increasingly complex issues: “I’m not Black or white or gray/I’m not he or she or they,” she declares on “The Thing at Hand.” But if her politics feel watered down so that even a child could understand, that’s in part by design. Case in point: Unprecedented Sh!t’s final track, “The Knowing,” is based on DiFranco’s children’s book of the same name, an attempt to impart some of the wisdom she’s garnered through the years to the next generation: “I have beliefs and someday those beliefs might change.”
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I know a catchy lead is a mainstay of journalism, but shame on you Sal Cinquemani and the editors of Slant for this introduction to DiFranco’s new album. I know that sex sells, and I guess lesbian sex sells more, but packing this review with imagery of Billie Eilish going down on another woman is, to use the title of the album you should have begun the review with, both unprecedented and shit.
Sal, You can focus more on the topic were assigned. Slant, find some editors who can slash at the writing detritus that we all produce occasionally. You can all do better. And if you can’t, I’m sure Star magazine needs journalists too.