Hilary Duff hasn’t released an album in 10 long years. But anticipation over her sixth record is suddenly ramping up, with a little assist from some good old-fashioned Disney girl gang gossip
Titled luck... or something (note the millenial penchant for lowercase), it’s due out February 20 and we’ve already had one lead single dropped late last year and a teaser for another this week. But the reason we’re paying attention now has to do with some juicy drama playing out online.
Duff, 38, built her now-30-something fanbase back in the early Noughties when we were growing up alongside her teen idol-creating turn as Lizzie McGuire, the Disney Channel hit show revolving around Duff’s adventure’s as a klutzy girl with a sassy animated inner monologue.
This in turned spawned The Lizzie McGuire movie, the ultimate sleepover party watch, with Duff playing both McGuire and an Italian pop star, culminating with a duet of school disco classic What Dreams Are Made Of.
Then who could forget her iconic 2004 star turn in A Cinderella Story, the teen romcom fairytale retelling where Chad Michael Murray played her prince charming, Jennifer Cooliage was iconic as her wicked, sunbed-addicted stepmother, and a clamshell phone subbed in for a glass slipper.
While she transitioned fairly smoothly from a young disney super star to a more minor adult celebrity, Duff’s career has been fairly quiet for years. She married and divorced Canadian hockey player Mike Comrie, with whom she shares custody of a son named Luca. She went on to marry musician Matthew Koma in 2019, and they’ve had three more children named Banks Mae and Townes.
Her new album launch might have continued puttering along until some (fairly low stakes, all things considered) drama started over a “mom group” apparently exited in a dramatic fashion by one Ashley Tisdale.
Tisdale, 40, is best known for her turn as musical mean girl Sharpay Evans in Disney’s High School Musical films, having previously starred on The Suite Life of Zack & Cody. While the soundtrack became a best-seller, Tisdale’s music career didn’t quite take off post-Disney. She’s currently married to Christopher French and they have two young children, Jupiter and Emerson.
Both women where Disney icons back in the day, but that doesn’t mean they’d be in each other’s orbit as adults. But as New Years Day dawned, Tisdale dropped a bombshell of a personal essay on New York Magazine site The Cut.
Titled Breaking Up With My Toxic Mom Group, it was adapted from a piece prieviously posted by Tisdale on her lifestyle blog. It detailed how she’d formally resigned from a friendship group based around motherhood after feeling left out of group activities. “I texted to the group after being left out from yet another group hang: ‘This is too high school for me and I don’t want to take part in it anymore.’ It didn’t exactly go over well, wrote Tisdale.
Within hours it had gone viral, and internet sleuths were convinved they’d found the “toxic mom group” in question — one that involved Hilary Duff. Tisdale didn’t name any names, simply describing her ex-circle as women “building brands, running their own companies, launching creative projects” who she met when “my friend brought together a group of new moms that she knew”.
Personally, I assumed that Tisdale was quietly shading some civilian mothers in her Los Angeles neighbourhood. But there are far nosier people on the internet, who must be saluted for their services to gossip.
Armchair detectives quickly re-surfaced a now-deleted 2022 post from Tisdale’s profile that showed her wearing matching sweatsuits with Hilary Duff and a group of women including singer Meghan Trainor. The post’s caption praised “an amazing group of women to journey through this mom-hood together!”
But Tisdale wasn’t in the photos of mothers-in-matching-outfits on an October 2025 trip to a fancy California hotel, where Duff was hanging out with singer Mandy Moore and buisnesswoman Janice Gott.
Then, to add fuel to internet fire, Duff’s husband Koma made an (admittedly pretty funny) post on Instagram where he photoshopped his own face onto Tisdale’s portrait for The Cut, and captioned it “A Mom Group Tell All Through A Father’s Eyes: When You’re The Most Self Obsessed Tone Deaf Person On Earth, Other Moms Tend To Switch Focus To Their Actual Toddlers”. Burn.
Things became heated enough that TMZ published a story paraphrasing “a rep for Ashley” saying the essay has been “twisted into clickbait” and “there’s zero truth to what online ‘detectives’ think they’ve cracked”.
@hilaryduff 🛏️✨🩵 😜
♬ original sound - hilaryduff
As for Duff? Well she’s simply used the increased eyeballs on her profiles to post a TikTok teaser of her new single with some wonderfully horny lyrics. Bathed in sunshine on a green hill in a yellow dress, Duff lip-syncs to lyrics such as “I want the part where you said goddamn/ Back of the dive bar giving you head” and “I’m at the front door touching myself/ But you don’t even look my way no more”.
We don’t know what this song’s name is yet (the captions contain a bed emoji, a sparkle emoji, a blue heart and a winky tongue-face) but we are HERE for it. From the snippet we’ve heard so far, it sounds like Duff is channelling Sabrina Carpenter for the 30-something woman wishing she could be done with relationship bed-death and get back to fooling around like a horny teenager with her long term partner.
Which leads us to the frankly criminally overlooked lead single for luck... or something else, titled Mature. “She's me, I'm her in a different font,” Duff sings about a younger woman dating her ex, with sympathy rather than malice. It’s a savage take-down of a man dating down that’s up there with Taylor Swift’s All To Well (10 Minute Version).
Again, a brilliant song to relate to your orginal fanbase lyrically. We’re actual grown-up women now, who have all been told we’re ‘so mature for your age, babe’ when we were younger. Usually by some useless older man who appeared cooler/smarter/worldlier than he ever was purely by dint of having a decade more lived experience on us.
Having some frienship group drama kick off at the same time as dropping these songs feels like a cosmic sync-up for Duff as she looks to reconnect with the former teen girls who used to buy her albums and go see her movies.
Honestly, even when you think you’re all grown up, some friendship drama will still sneak up and make you feel like you’re back on MSN Messenger hashing it out with your besties in a hormone-fuelled haze.
While I wouldn’t put anything past celebrity marketing tactics, this seems like a genuinely organic drama that’s blown up right as Duff is poised to drop an album laser-precisioned to resonate with her OG fanbase of millenial girlies. I guess that’s just luck... or something.
