Three years on from her mammoth sophomore album Happier Than Ever (which followed her behemoth debut record), Billie Eilish is even more culturally festooned, after her all-slaying ballad for last year’s Barbie soundtrack, ‘What Was I Made For? scooped a Grammy and an Oscar (her second). All that palaver makes it even more surprising that HIT ME HARD AND SOFT, announced suddenly last month, dropped with no advance singles or videos. Eilish doubled down on that care free attitude, revealing to Zane Lowe in an Apple Music video, that she and Finneas, her producer brother, created it without much deference to any other person.

That’s cool. So too, is ‘Chihiro’ - named after the protagonist of Hayao Miyazaki’s Golden Bear winning Spirited Away, whose parents, in a Circean narrative, are transformed into pigs - a R&B soul track that morphs into fabulous ghoulish trance, finds Eilish at perhaps her most hereto abstract, and leaves the listener thirsting for more of where that came from. Similarly, the outro of sapphic club banger ‘Lunch’ is headily marvelous and will have you looking forward to an outstretched remix. Both the vintage synths of ‘Bittersuite’ and happycore diluted ‘L’amour de ma vie’ repeat that trick and perhaps point to a road soon to be travelled.

Elsewhere goth doused and music hall inflected ‘The Diner’ discovers Eilish in the role of wretched stalker - which is brave, considering it is a sinister plague which the artist herself as endured more than once - the Baby Reindeer madness of it all is unsettling; the warped whispered repetition of her phone number at song’s end - hellish. Meanwhile album closer ‘Blue’ tacks through a clatter of genres wonderfully, proving that one of the brightest stars to emerge in the 21st century possesses serious moxie.