Restoring a pop icon is a balancing act that rarely avoids complacency, and Hilary Duff's “luck… or something” is no exception.
After a decade of recording silence, the return does not take the form of a Copernican revolution, but rather as a cautious adjustment in the context of an adult pop that suffers from an unresolved tension between Lizzie McGuire-style nostalgia and domestic maturity.
Matthew Koma's (her husband) production smoothes out every roughness, crafting an architecture of smooth synths and flat melodies where vulnerability, far from being an abyss, becomes an all too legible lyrical device.
There's an infectious affability to these eleven tracks, but it's a warmth that emanates from a comfort zone that's never really questioned.
Duff explores the tangle of motherhood and the shallows of thirty with a colloquial prose that, on the one hand, guarantees immediate usability, on the other, slides dangerously towards an emotional banality without bite.
The album lives on a dialectic between the desire to reveal the secret corners of the self and the need to maintain a mirroring surface, a melodic pop without edges that seems to fear the specific weight of silence.
Although the artist claims the need to choose herself and face what scares her, the sound result appears filtered, a controlled exposition of anxieties and obsessions that lack the ferocity necessary to really have an impact.
“luck… or something” stands out as a finely crafted artefact, an honest but perhaps too polite portrait of a woman who tries to recalibrate her own myth into a domestic narrative, without however finding that flash of rupture capable of transforming the personal chronicle into a collective epic.
SCORE: 6.50
THE VOTES OF OTHERS
Rolling Stone (USA) – Rating 8.00
Pitchfork – Rating 6.30
Paste Magazine – Rating 5.00
TO LISTEN NOW
Weather For Tennis – Future Tripping – The Optimist
TO BE SKIPPED IMMEDIATELY
One listen is enough!
