Billie Eilish has announced that she will release her third album ‘Hit Me Hard And Soft’ on 17 May. Wanna hear a song from it? Well, you can’t. She’s also said that there will be no singles released ahead of it coming out. What she has made available though is full details of the sustainable manufacturing processes for the physical releases of the album. Which is the next best thing, I’m sure you’ll agree.
An advocate for more sustainable practices in the music industry throughout her career, she has announced that eight different variations of the record will be released on vinyl. The standard black edition will be made from 100% recycled black vinyl. Seven coloured editions will be made using a combination of two different solutions, Eco-Mix and BioVinyl.
Eco-Mix is made using leftover material from other records during the manufacturing process meaning “every disc will be unique and look different from the last”, according to Eilish’s website. BioVinyl, meanwhile, is made using “non-fossil fuel materials like used cooking oil or industrial waste gases”.
The shells of the cassette edition will be manufactured from other recycled cassettes, while the packaging of all physical releases, including CDs, will be made out of card using a combination of recycled and sustainable fibres.
Although producing multiple editions of her own album, Eilish was recently critical of artists producing multiple physical editions of their records in order to boost sales and therefore chart positions - particularly when done in an unsustainable way.
“I can’t even express to you how wasteful it is”, she said in an interview published by Billboard. “I find it really frustrating as somebody who really goes out of my way to be sustainable [that] some of the biggest artists in the world are making 40 different vinyl packages that have a different unique thing just to get you to keep buying more”.
However, she also noted that this is the result of the structure of the industry and the way charts weigh physical sales against digital streams. This creates a system where putting out multiple physical editions is “the only way to play the game” and simply highlights “this already kind of messed up way of this industry working”.
Recognising that, even with her efforts to be more sustainable, she is still playing into this system by producing eight different vinyl editions of her new album, her website notes, “sustainable design [is] an imperfect journey of efforts” but she and her team are working “towards constant improvement”.