Hilary Duff’s first album in over a decade, Luck… or Something, finds the former tween star scouring her younger years for the key that’ll unlock her bewildering present. The 38-year-old performer and mother of four is riddled with the kind of insecurities that’ll sound familiar to any woman who goes to therapy once a week or exchanges memes in a mom group chat. On “Future Tripping,” a kiss sends her spiraling about whether her partner’s imagined midlife crisis will involve either a new car or an affair with some Bon Iver-loving “bitch at a bar,” while the aging process has her much more existentially agitated on “Tell Me That Won’t Happen,” as she frets that she’s “felt everything that I’m gonna feel.”
Now that she’s older and wiser, Duff’s interpretations of her upbringing and past relationships are the observations of someone well-adjusted enough to recognize how simultaneously normal and abnormal their life truly is, and Luck… or Something benefits from this keen, inward-directed eye. Her aptitude for being a “seasoned apologist” and “amateur psychologist” may be partly due to having been “a child of divorce,” as she sings on opener “Weather for Tennis.”
But even when Duff’s emotional baggage threatens to sweep away all the good in her life, a determined sunniness eventually shines through in the music. The guitars are spritely, and the chord progressions familiar and comforting. The singer’s voice carries a Carly Rae Jepsen-esque earnestness and playful self-awareness that can make even the corniest of lyrics feel affecting, as on the wistful closer “Adult Size Medium.” Her hesitant bullishness is adeptly punctuated by sarcastic one-liners, sounding at all times like she’s smiling through gritted teeth.
Still, Duff can’t save tracks like “Mature,” a pop-rock kiss-off to an ex weighed down by clichéd lyrics such as “She looks like she could be your daughter/Like me before I got smarter.” And while her ambiguity about who she is now paradoxically gives Luck… or Something thematic order, the album’s soundscape remains indistinct. It seems like Duff and her collaborators (including husband Matthew Koma and Brian Phillips) are playing catch-up to genre signifiers that have already been exhausted by the likes of Hailee Steinfeld and Natasha Bedingfield.
Even a catchy track like “Roommates” can’t escape feeling amorphous thanks to an overreliance on synth-pad swells and drum programming that sound ripped from Taylor Swift’s 1989. But anyone looking to Duff for avant-garde pop stylings isn’t looking in the right place to begin with. For the rest of us, Luck… or Something doesn’t represent a bold reinvention of Duff as an artist or a person, but it successfully reinforces exactly what made her so charming in the first place.
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I expect no less from Slant. A biased piece with no taste
I think this is one of the least substantiated reviews I’ve read in years. Mature is a pop masterpiece, precisely because of the cliché lyrics. I don’t think you fully understand who Hilary Duff is, what she does, and more importantly, what her intention is with this album.