Rob Sheffield has called every Eilish album 'brilliant.' The word means nothing now.

Rob Sheffield's review of Hit Me Hard and Soft opens by telling us Billie Eilish is 'brilliant,' which is the kind of opening gambit that tells you the review is over before it's begun. When a critic leads with the conclusion, everything that follows is just decoration. Sheffield has decided this album is great, and now he needs to reverse-engineer 1,200 words of justification. It's like watching someone write a university essay starting from the bibliography.

The headline calls Eilish 'more playful, more pissed, and as brilliant as ever,' deploying the rule of three like a man who learned rhetoric from a TED talk. Sheffield's Eilish reviews have a pattern: he treats her like a generational savior roughly every 18 months when a new album drops, writes with breathless admiration for 1,000 words, and then moves on to the next artist without ever reckoning with whether his previous predictions came true. He called Happier Than Ever a 'revolution' in 2021. Did the revolution happen, Rob? Can we get a status update? Or do we just keep declaring revolutions every album cycle until one sticks?

The most revealing moment in the review is what's absent: any acknowledgment that Hit Me Hard and Soft might not work for everyone. Sheffield writes exclusively in superlatives, which creates a paradox — if every Eilish album is brilliant, then none of them are, because you've destroyed your own scale. A critic who gives everything an A is not a critic. They're a mirror. And mirrors are useful, but you don't pay them for their opinion.