CHIHIRO

“CHIHIRO” is the molten heart of Billie Eilish‘s third album, HIT ME HARD AND SOFT (May 17, 2024) — track three, written and produced with her brother Finneas in their Los Angeles home studio. It slinks in on a hypnotic bassline and a half-whispered vocal, then splits itself wide open into one of the record’s most cathartic drops.

What “CHIHIRO” is about: the title nods to Chihiro Ogino, the young heroine of Studio Ghibli’s Spirited Away, and Billie uses that fairy tale as a mirror for a love that keeps slipping through her fingers. It’s a song about connection fading and memory going soft at the edges — someone who forgets, a door that won’t stay open, a familiar face at the counter that turns out to belong to a stranger. The line “Have you eaten? Are you feeling well?” is a direct wink at the film’s rule that you must eat the food of the spirit world or you’ll disappear; here it becomes a small, aching act of care between two people drifting apart.

Like Ghibli’s Haku and No-Face, nobody in the song is all light or all dark — that refusal to make people simple is the whole point. Musically it’s Eilish and Finneas at their most shapeshifting: a track that opens as a hush and ends somewhere far bigger, all mood and undertow. It became one of the album’s most talked-about songs, and the Spirited Away-soaked visuals only deepen the spell.