‘luck… or something’ review: Hilary Duff is still the new girl

There’s a specific kind of millennial woman that Hilary Duff has always represented. Not the one who burned everything down in spectacular, tabloid-ready fashion, but the one who kept her head down, made her choices quietly, and arrived at 38 slightly bewildered that she is, somehow, a person. Not the person she planned to be, exactly. Just a person. With kids and chickens and a husband and a house and the nagging, insomniac suspicion that she may have already felt the best things she’s ever going to feel.

Worth the wait?

luck… or something, Duff’s sixth album and first in over a decade, is about that very suspicion. It is not a grand artistic statement. It’s not even a reinvention, which most expected. It is, instead, something rarer and more interesting. A pop record that admits it doesn’t have many answers. That keeps asking the same questions in slightly different rooms. And it trusts the listener enough to let that repetition land as meaning rather than failure. It is a record made by a woman who has been famous since she was thirteen, who married her producer, who made it inside of a sealed domestic bubble, and who — somehow, improbably — has ended up with the most honest thing she’s ever put her name on.

Whether or not it’s a great album depends on what you ask of great. By the standards of Dignity, her 2007 electropop pivot, it doesn’t have that record’s propulsive weirdness or its dancefloor ambition. By the standards of Metamorphosis, it doesn’t have those songs’ cultural velocity or their ability to soundtrack a generation’s awkward becoming. What it has instead is something those records couldn’t dream of. A woman in full, looking back at herself from a distance. And not flinching at what she sees. Or flinching, but singing about it anyway.

The album opens with “Weather for Tennis,” which is structurally a song about a certain type of argument. You know the one. The circular, dinner-time, nobody-wins argument that long-term couples have mastered into its own brand of awful intimacy. But it’s also a song about the psychological inheritance of growing up in a broken home.

“Keep the peace, ’cause I’m a kid of divorce,” Duff sings in the pre-chorus, “and you’re the starter of wars and there’s no winning in yours.” It’s a line that does a lot of work efficiently. It tells you who she is, why she capitulates. Why she’s finally, tentatively, thinking about stopping.

The chorus — “You calling me batsh*t is the fastest antibiotic for thinking you’re different this time” — is one of the album’s cleverest constructions. It’s a sentence that only makes sense if you’ve been called batsh*t by someone you loved, and then felt the cold clarity that followed. The way the accusation burned away the last of your illusions about them. Duff delivers it with the breezy lightness of someone describing the weather. That gap between lyrical content and tonal presentation is the album’s central aesthetic choice. And it mostly works.

Then comes “Roommates,” and the record suddenly announces what it’s actually capable of.

The best Hilary Duff song…ever?

Let’s spend some time with “Roommates” because it’s probably the best song Hilary Duff has ever recorded. And it could even be underrated even in the context of the album’s otherwise warm reception. The song is, on its surface, about sexual desire. Specifically about wanting your partner to want you the way they once did, before domesticity smoothed everything into comfortable coexistence. But what makes it remarkable is not its frankness about desire (though that frankness is real and necessary and, for Duff, genuinely transgressive given her history as America’s foremost good girl) — it’s the emotional architecture underneath that frankness.

“I only want the beginning, I don’t want the end,” she sings in the chorus. “Want the part where you say, ‘God**mn’ / Back of the dive bar, giving you head / Then sneak home late, wake up your roommates.” The thing that hits about this, even more than its explicitness, is that it’s the grammar of nostalgia. She doesn’t just want the physical act. She wants what the physical act *meant*. Its urgency, novelty, and feeling of being so desired that you were worth sneaking around for. The dive bar is a shorthand for a whole emotional universe. One of youth, recklessness, the pleasure of being someone’s secret.

The bridge is where the song breaks your heart a little. “I wanna stay your new girl / Always-think-I’m-cute girl / Only in the whole world.” We’re way beyond sex at this point. We’re on top of that grief where you have to watch yourself become ordinary in front of someone who once found you extraordinary. The line about being “paranoid of new girls / all the shiny cute girls” comes packaged with a low-grade dread. This is someone who has been, at various points in her life, the new shiny girl who replaced someone else. Duff knows both sides of this equation. The song is smart enough not to resolve it fully.

And then the outro just repeats “You don’t even look my way no more” until the track ends. Which is the right choice. That’s how these things actually feel. We don’t always get the climax. Sometimes we have to settle for the slow fade into the silence of being in a room with someone who has stopped seeing you.

Women of a different font.

“Mature” plays itself late in the album (track nine) and has been the most-discussed song in the pre-release period, and for good reason. It’s a takedown of an all-too-known archetype. The older man who cycles through younger women, complimenting each one’s unusual maturity as though he invented the phrase. As though the observation itself is seduction. And it’s delivered with a sardonic calm that is more devastating than anger would be.

The opening verse is almost casual in its precision. “She’s me, I’m her in a different font / Just a few years younger, a new haircut.” That “Different font” is a seriously good lyric. It captures exactly how these men work, swapping out versions of the same woman with serene obliviousness, like they’re updating a spreadsheet. The chorus, where Duff delivers “You’re so mature for your age, babe” in a mock-chant, transforms the phrase from compliment to diagnosis. She’s revealing it as a weapon by saying it back at the volume it deserves.

What elevates “Mature” above simple score-settling is the bridge, which earns the song’s psychological credibility. “Watched the tide rise up as high as you got on me / Listening to ‘Strawberry Letter 23’ / Hid my car at Carbon Beach so I wasn’t seen at yours.” Suddenly the song acquires specificity. A song. A beach. And a hidden car.

Graciously, these aren’t generic details from the Chainsmokers songwriting school. This is the stuff of recent memory, held because it felt shameful at the time. Hiding your car so no one sees you going to his house. The casual intimacy of listening to music in the dark with someone who is using you.

These details thus transform “Mature” from a familiar Olivia Rodrigo-style takedown into something more personal and therefore more resonant. More Hilary. By the time she closes with the repeated “you’re so mature for your age, babe” one last time, it functions less as mockery and more as a kind of obituary for her younger self.

Writing from inside the suffering.

We should address the family songs, because they represent the album’s spiritual spine. In a way that the marriage material, for all its wit, doesn’t quite match.

“We Don’t Talk” is about her sister Haylie, and it’s the album’s most formally conventional song. It’s built around a Gotye-adjacent xylophone figure and a chorus that is almost uncomfortably repetitive in its mimicry of what estrangement actually feels like. And it’s the same thought cycling endlessly without resolution.

“We come from the same home, the same blood / A different combination, but the same lock” is the song’s best couplet. And its best word is “Lock.” These are two people who were once fashioned by the same forces, and now can’t get past each other. The bridge — “Let’s have it out / I’ll hear you out, you’ll hear me out on the couch / Get back to how we were as kids” — is so nakedly desperate that it’s almost uncomfortable to listen to. Duff clearly isn’t writing about this from the position of someone who has made peace. She’s writing about it from inside the wound.

A magic trick.

“The Optimist” is the album’s most vulnerable song. Also its most formally beautiful. It’s about her father, and about the exhaustion of continuing to hope that a parent who has failed you will eventually show up.

The first verse — about going to a hypnotist and asking not to dream, because her inner life has become too crowded with unresolved feeling — is a quietly devastating opening gambit. The chorus articulates a set of wishes that most children of emotionally absent fathers will recognize immediately.

She wishes he’d showed up at her wedding. Wishes he’d called to ask how she was eating. Wishes the love was simply there in the way that fathers are supposed to love daughters. “But ’til then I’ll exist as the optimist” is the song’s key phrase. And the construction is precise. Being an optimist about this is no virtue. It’s a survival/coping mechanism. It’s the story she tells herself because the alternative is far too worse.

The bridge lands the knife. “I know a dirty little magic trick / To disappear and disconnect / Maybe I learned it from the best.” She’s saying that her capacity for emotional dissociation — which she’s been deploying as a coping method her whole life — she learned from her father. The man who taught her to vanish by vanishing from her.

The outro “But it’s hard to exist as the optimist” arrives stripped of the melody’s comforting brightness. Just the admission itself hanging in the air. It’s likely her most personal minefield of a song to date, and arguably the most complete thing she’s written.

How did we get here?

The album’s closer, “Adult Size Medium,” is where everything lands. It’s an exercise in the dissociation of realizing that the person you remember being is still inside you somewhere. But that the life you’re living has become unfamiliar enough that you can’t always see yourself in it.

“Was it a sip of wine or Aperol? / I remember everything and nothing at all” is a beautiful line about the way memory works. In music videos, memory is often a film or some other cinematic experience. In these words, its a collection of textures, sensations, moments without context.

The outro is the album’s real thesis statement. “Try-hards, icons, Sunday morning Super Bowls / Turn-ons, tampons, edibles and bloated calls / I remember it all and I remember nothing / How did we get here? Was it luck or something?”

The accumulation of nouns here — the specific, embarrassing, human, ordinary nouns — is the closest the album comes to saying what it’s been circling all along. Life is just a bunch of try-hards and tampons and Sunday morning television. And you arrive somewhere at the end of it, or not even the end, just the middle, and you look around and ask how. The question has no good answer. The record doesn’t pretend it does.

I guess this is growing… down?

The album has real limitations. Duff’s voice has never been and will never be a technical instrument of range or power. And there are moments — particularly on “The Optimist,” which requires emotional devastation the production gestures at without her vocal instrument always delivering — where you feel the gap between what she’s trying to express and what she can physically render.

Some of the contemporary-coded lyrics land badly: “Life is lifing and pressure is pressuring me,” on “Roommates,” is a phrase that will date this album badly. And not in the charming way that “So Yesterday” has dated. The album’s sonic palette is warm but not especially adventurous. Every song is recognizably the same Koma-and-Phillips production, which creates coherence at the cost of surprise.

Strangest of all is “Growing Up,” which interpolates Blink-182’s “Dammit.” To be clear, it’s not an exact lift or sample, but it’s certainly a melodic reference that perhaps aims to make Duff’s version of Miley Cyrus “Flowers.” But instead it just comes off as the first draft of a cover song.

Despite the album’s imperfections and inability to stretch beyond its Carly Rae Jepsen register, Duff’s symphonic ambitions are clear and largely fulfilled. “Roommates” and “Mature” and “The Optimist” are truly excellent songs. “Adult Size Medium” is among the most honest pop-mainstream songs written about millennial aging since Taylor Swift’s “Long Live.” And it came to us without the mythology-building that Swift’s project requires.

Lucky visuals.

The album’s promotional imagery deserves a moment. The primary press photo — Duff on the floor of what appears to be a hotel room or apartment, wearing an oversized burgundy sweater and thigh-high stockings, looking upward and slightly away from the camera — is doing something deliberate and a little complicated all at once. It is undeniably alluring. But the glamour is not performative in the way her early career imagery was. She’s not posed for the audience. She’s posed for herself, or for no one in particular. Caught in the middle of something private. The gaze going up and away is the key detail. She’s not inviting you in. But she is letting you watch.

That tension between the intimacy of the image and its refusal to fully meet the viewer’s eye maps almost perfectly onto the album’s emotional logic. luck… or something is a confessional record that nevertheless maintains a certain reserve. Duff tells you about hiding her car at Carbon Beach and wanting her father’s love and masturbating by the front door while her partner doesn’t look at her, and she delivers all of it with that same slightly averted quality. Warm but not exactly desperate, candid but not entirely exhibitionist. The photo and the music are making the same argument. I will show you a great deal. But I am still, finally, my own.

The bottom line.

Hilary Duff has always been the millennial everywoman because she was ordinary in her extraordinariness. Too famous to be average, too relatable to be glamorous. The girl next door at a scale that only Disney can manufacture.

So to that end, luck… or something works because it takes that ordinariness seriously. It treats the experience of being a 38-year-old woman who sometimes hides in her own marriage, who aches for her sister’s friendship, who has forgiven a father who never asked to be forgiven, who catches herself looking at old photos and not recognizing the person looking back, as something worth documenting. As something that might matter to someone else who is going through the same thing in a house without a backyard in Beverly Hills. As something, in other words, that pop music can and should do.

Was it luck? Or maybe something else? The album doesn’t know. Neither do we.

luck… or something is available now. Album cover image courtesy of Atlantic Records.