Pitchfork

Hilary Duff: luck… or something

Read Olivia Horn's review of the album.

luck… is less Zedd and more Carly Rae Jepsen, another former Koma collaborator, whose bright, princess-y vocal tone resembles Duff's. The album's base notes are chirpy synths and strummy acoustic pop, embellished with gated drum fills and swoopy strings—softer, 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 "You From the Honeymoon," where she parrots Tinashe while looking back on young love: "Your kinda freak matched my kinda freak." The words sound like magnetic fridge poetry—jumbled and foreign in her mouth.

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's a painstaking wordsmith (the album's opening lines rhyme "apologist" with "psychologist"); at others she's a gal pal tossing off a bitchy text about her husband ("Future Tripping") or fretting over an apparent rift with her sister ("We Don't Talk"). There are clunkers ("You calling me batshit's the fastest antibiotic/For thinking you're different this time"). There are inscrutable metaphors (I'm still not sure what the holey T-shirt in "Adult Size Medium" is all about).

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't let it overtake the narrative. While album closer "Adult Size Medium" has the hallmarks of a triumphant retrospective—it's cavernous, sweeping in scope and sound, with callbacks to the golden days of youth and the blur of years gone by—it's mostly just raw material. The bridge is a literal checklist: "Try-hards, icons, Sunday mornings, Super Bowls, turn ons, tampons, edibles, and booty calls." Duff doesn't try to mold it into a legacy. She actually sounds pretty ambivalent: "I remember it all/And I remember nothing." 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's still trying to remember her lines. Who can relate?

STOP THE COUNT!

Way too generous

What Halsey said

I like the album a lot, but I think you all set your standards for P4K way too high. This is a decent score for a non-alt adjacent pop album. Not everything has to be an 8 or above, and they certainly didn't pan it

Edited February 20Feb 20 by Veckatimest

Good score considering the only standouts are mature and roommates. The other ones are just water downed mellow pop songs.

Ok, work acclaim!

Only 0.5 below HMHAS!

Isn't that pretty good for a Hilary Duff album?

We'll take it

This actually a good score for Hilary, should have been a 7.5 but it's all good.

The review reads much more scathing than the score so all things considered it's a good one

Lol who the **** is checking that website for a review of Hilary Duff. Lol

6 minutes ago, on the line said:

Lol who the **** is checking that website for a review of Hilary Duff. Lol

ATRL user Graffiti ..

3 hours ago, eclipsed said:

Isn't that pretty good for a Hilary Duff album?

it's amazing... her albums are usually penned by critics

3 hours ago, eclipsed said:

Isn't that pretty good for a Hilary Duff album?

It's fantastic for a Hilary Duff album. Has Pitchfork even bothered reviewing any of her other albums?

4 hours ago, Graffiti said:

(the album's opening lines rhyme "apologist" with "psychologist")

3 hours ago, rmmas said:

Good score considering the only standouts are mature and roommates. The other ones are just water downed mellow pop songs.

so Midnights basically

their opinion hasn't mattered for a long time, so I wouldn't trust them for highs or lows

The fact that this is the first time they ever review her says a lot. But we'll take it, although we don't need it.

I think this was a fair review, even if it was wrong in some aspects. Its an 8.

I definitely agree with some of their criticisms. Hilary tried to pull an Audrey Hobert/Gracie Abrams with the songwriting, but it didn't work for her much like how it didn't work for them.