LOS ANGELES — Retired actress and former Disney Channel musician Hilary Duff is returning to music after a ten-year hiatus, and according to her husband Matthew Koma, she’s about to drop a song so powerful, it might undo all the sonic damage inflicted by Kanye West’s latest descent into controversy.
Koma, known for both producing music and being Hilary’s “Instagram husband,” took to social media to rant with the urgency of a man who just discovered his wife was the last bastion of pop purity. Hilary needs to “save millennial pop music,” he posted, alongside a pic of Duff and caption so long we didn’t bother to read it. “It needs her now more than ever,” we think someone commented somewhere underneath.
The announcement centers around Hilary’s upcoming single, “Heil Hitler”, a controversial title to be sure, but not one we haven’t heard of recently. Koma insists that, despite the eyebrow-raising name, her track is “a response, a reclamation, and a reckoning”—a bold claim, especially considering the competition.
The competition, of course, is Ye (formerly Kanye West), who recently released a track also titled “Heil Hitler”, a song so offensive, confusingly tone-deaf, and lyrically catastrophic that music critics, historians, and random people on Reddit all collectively said “fuck you Kanye!” in the largest form of communal harmony this country has seen since 9/11.
The music video, which features a handful of men and women dressed in animal skins chanting in a blue room for some reason, has been described as “insulting,” “offensive,” and “absolutely the stupidest fucking thing any of us have ever seen in our entire lives.”
But Duff’s husband Koma is confident that Hilary’s version of “Heil Hitler” will provide a palate cleanser for the ears of a Lizzie McGuire generation. “This isn’t shock value,” he explained. “It’s Duff value.”
The single is expected to debut on Spotify later this year, just in time to battle Ye’s downward spiral for cultural relevance and, considering every streaming platform on the planet save for the Elon Musk-controlled X has removed Ye’s version of the song, there really isn’t much to contend with. However, early leaks suggest Duff’s “Heil Hitler” may actually be an acronym for “Hope Ends In Light,” but we aren’t entirely sure about the ‘Hitler’ part.
Either way, pop fans are ready. And scared. But mostly ready.