{"id":300518,"date":"2026-02-20T06:14:07","date_gmt":"2026-02-20T06:14:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/300518\/"},"modified":"2026-02-20T06:14:07","modified_gmt":"2026-02-20T06:14:07","slug":"hilary-duff-luck-or-something-album-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/300518\/","title":{"rendered":"Hilary Duff: Luck\u2026 or Something Album Review"},"content":{"rendered":"

Thankfully, both Duff and Koma have moved on from the thumping theatrics of the mid-2010s. luck\u2026 is less Zedd and more Carly Rae Jepsen<\/a>, another former Koma collaborator, whose bright, princess-y vocal tone resembles Duff\u2019s. The album\u2019s base notes are chirpy synths and strummy acoustic pop, embellished with gated drum fills and swoopy strings\u2014softer, pliable sounds that offer a more natural foundation for Duff. Still, her voice is a limiting factor here: She lacks fluidity and range, often seeming to sing individual notes rather than full phrases. This is especially detrimental when her lyrics already feel forced, like on \u201cYou From the Honeymoon,\u201d where she parrots<\/a> Tinashe<\/a> while looking back on young love: \u201cYour kinda freak matched my kinda freak.\u201d The words sound like magnetic fridge poetry\u2014jumbled and foreign in her mouth.<\/p>\n

This is the first of her albums on which Duff is a credited co-writer on every song, and she seems to still be finding her footing as a lyricist. She auditions different voices: At times she\u2019s a painstaking wordsmith (the album\u2019s opening lines rhyme \u201capologist\u201d with \u201cpsychologist\u201d); at others she\u2019s a gal pal tossing off a bitchy text about her husband (\u201cFuture Tripping\u201d) or fretting over an apparent rift with her sister (\u201cWe Don\u2019t Talk\u201d). There are clunkers (\u201cYou calling me batshit\u2019s the fastest antibiotic\/For thinking you\u2019re different this time\u201d). There are inscrutable metaphors (I\u2019m still not sure what the holey T-shirt in \u201cAdult Size Medium\u201d is all about). There is even, inexplicably, an entire chorus cribbed from a blink-182<\/a> song.<\/p>\n

But there are also moments of bracing clarity\u2014little reminders of how relatable pop stars got to be so popular in the first place. Despite its sparkly guitar and triumphant tone, \u201cTell Me That Won\u2019t Happen\u201d is streaked with existential dread; its hook, \u201cI\u2019m worried that I\u2019ve felt everything I\u2019ll ever feel,\u201d is about as pithy an expression of the terror of getting older as I\u2019ve heard. On \u201cRoommates,\u201d Duff pre-empts possible humiliation with humor: \u201cWe would laugh,\u201d she sings to her partner, emphasis on we, if she tried to light a spark by \u201cwalking in in something sexy.\u201d It\u2019s a joke, except it\u2019s not. There\u2019s something vital and deeply human in this vignette. Who hasn\u2019t felt unwanted? Who hasn\u2019t feared rejection? The rub, of course, is that Duff is beautiful, charming, successful, and desirable by any measure. This is the relatable pop star\u2019s trick: showing us ourselves in a rose-colored mirror.<\/p>\n

Things get most interesting when the mirrors multiply. We see ourselves in Duff; Duff sees herself in another woman on \u201cMature,\u201d luck\u2026\u2019s high mark. It\u2019s about recognizing yourself not as an individual but as a demographic\u2014in this case, the sort of young, blonde woman that an older man habitually dates. Those familiar with Duff\u2019s biography may plot some of the coordinates here: Beginning when she was 16, Duff was in a long-term relationship with a musician nearly a decade her senior. She has demurred on the specifics, but the contours of the story are familiar all the same, given the post-#MeToo reckoning that\u2019s prompted many women to reassess their age-gap relationships. \u201cIf you can still be considered \u2018mature for your age,\u2019 you are not an older person\u2019s equal,\u201d Tavi Gevinson wrote in a poignant 2021 essay<\/a> on the subject. \u201cThis observation can easily go from an act of respect to license for harm.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nostalgia can be a balm, but it can also be a smoke machine, obscuring that which is difficult to revisit. To her credit, Duff doesn\u2019t let it overtake the narrative. While album closer \u201cAdult Size Medium\u201d has the hallmarks of a triumphant retrospective\u2014it\u2019s cavernous, sweeping in scope and sound, with callbacks to the golden days of youth and the blur of years gone by\u2014it\u2019s mostly just raw material. The bridge is a literal checklist: \u201cTry-hards, icons, Sunday mornings, Super Bowls, turn ons, tampons, edibles, and booty calls.\u201d Duff doesn\u2019t try to mold it into a legacy. She actually sounds pretty ambivalent: \u201cI remember it all\/And I remember nothing.\u201d Life has highs and lows, but mostly it has middles that we mostly forget. At what should be her curtain call, Duff admits that she\u2019s still trying to remember her lines. Who can relate?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Thankfully, both Duff and Koma have moved on from the thumping theatrics of the mid-2010s. luck\u2026 is less…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":300519,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[5316,458,146,85,46,5101],"class_list":["post-300518","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-albums","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-web"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/300518","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=300518"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/300518\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/300519"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=300518"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=300518"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=300518"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}