We too are sticking together on this…

[Video]
[7.11]

Jonathan Bradley: The catchiest and prettiest thing on Hit Me Hard and Soft is this micro-scale nighttime fantasia, a burble of dazed affection and death imagery; it’s Billie’s most mellow evocation of the macabre to date. Her vocal is light but dexterous, pushing some syllables away, swooning on others, opening out when restraint threatens to take over entirely. A lesser performer would melt into the production — the sort that we used to call lap-pop, back when not all pop could be produced on a home computer and that could mark a sound. It’s interior in outlook, a composition of detail rather than impact. And the details are what sell this: the pattering thump of drums, the sleepy sprawl of the synth textures, the faint sparkling of guitar arpeggios that decorate rather than dominate. It’s a toybox tune, but one where the toys come to life as you dream.
[8]

Kat Stevens: This is how I remember it: Sharon and Tracey are trying to win a cash prize at a karaoke competition, presumably to get themselves out of some sort of financial scrape. Tracey is reluctant at first but eventually commits to their hamfisted “I Will Survive” dance routine. However, Sharon gets stage fright at the last minute, leaving their man-eating, snobby next-door neighbour Dorian to save the day. Dorian pinch-hits “Like A Virgin” to the delighted crowd, and I decide that the next time I do karaoke, I will copy this schtick down to the very last gyration. Everything else about Birds Of A Feather was shit, so Billie has a low bar to clear here.
[5]

Katherine St. Asaph: The sort of genial soft-rock arrangement Haim have made a whole career of, enlivened by the kind of vocal acrobatics Billie normally holds back.
[7]

Jackie Powell: When “Birds of a Feather” was first released, critics immediately projected that it could be a top 40 radio mainstay or song of the summer, as this track is the “purest pop” Billie Eilish probably has in her catalog. It’s a foot tapper, and the combination of kazoos, acoustic guitars and melodic synthesizers emulate how a bird typically flitters around. But I don’t view “Birds of a Feather” as Eilish selling out or chart-hunting. Creating a song that sounds like the younger sister of Wham!’s “Last Christmas” — which Eilish’s main collaborator and brother Finneas believes is a major compliment — isn’t complying with some sort of industry trend. It’s not like Eilish went country like so many other pop acts have in the past three months. She also challenges herself vocally. Eilish has always been gifted at blending her upper register with her chest voice, and she shows off her excellent mixing in each pre-chorus, especially on the phrases “I don’t” and “might not.” So where does she challenge herself? Right in that final chorus, where Eilish crescendos on each overlapped response that begins with “til.” There are three of them. She begins in her head voice, mixes on the second, and then takes a risk and belts in a way we’ve never really heard before, her voice going on the proverbial rollercoaster that vocal teachers always have their students visualize and try to execute in warmups. “I couldn’t belt until I was literally 18,” Eilish told Zane Lowe. “I couldn’t physically do it.” Now she clearly can, and she’s all the more versatile — the exact opposite of an artist’s intent when “selling out.”
[8]

Mark Sinker: Not doctorate-level semiotics here, but this comes into focus as a song – from sweetly yearning fuzzgoth to something more bodily and bitter and present — when the verse rhyme-endings switch from open vowels (-ay, -oo, -ee) to that hard array of -its. Which, I mean, yes, it’s actually Californian alveolar tapping shading into glottal stops, and that final rhyme of “stupi… ” actually trails off into the Billie-est of ether, so the bitter bodily array is way more implied than it’s physically there.
[8]

Alfred Soto: Part of the charm of “BIRDS” is how it sounds like a demo for a dance-floor banger. That’s also one of its hindrances. “I’ll love you till the day that I die” is fine once, a place-filler every other time. 
[7]

Wayne Weizhen Zhang: This John Legend, Lewis Capaldi corny-ass song sounds slightly pleasant when sung by Billie, but do yourself a favor and go listen to the “Guess” remix instead. 
[6]

Ian Mathers: On the surface this is just pleasant (hits me soft, you could say), but I keep coming back to the “say you wanna quit, don’t be stupid” part. Whether you hear this as about siblings or romance, there’s just enough of that element to undercut (or maybe ground) the florid declarations of the rest of it.
[8]

Nortey Dowuona: At one point in 1886, it was estimated that 50 American bird species were hunted for their feathers. Passenger pigeons and Carolina parakeets went extinct, one after the other. If not for the crusading of Harriet Hemenway and cousin Minna Hall and the passage of the Weeks-McLean Law (aka the Migratory Bird Act) by Congress in 1913, backed by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918, snowy egrets would’ve been plucked to extinction. Think of all the years it took to get that passed into law and backed by the Supreme Court. Think of how much longer it will be until trans rights and the rights of the entire LGBT community are enshrined into law. And how much longer this song will last until that happens, long after me and Billie and you are dead.
[7]