Hilary Duff's Cat In The Hat Song Slaps Harder Than It Should

Hilary Duff has been healing our inner child all year long — and now, she’s healing actual children with a new bop. On Oct. 2, the actor-singer released an original song for the new animated Cat In The Hat movie, fittingly titled “CATastrophe.” And it quite literally puts the “cat” in “catastrophe,” as the title promises. Yes, it’s kind of a mess. But yes, it deserves the Oscar (sorry, Taylor Swift).

Co-written and produced with her husband Matthew Koma, “CATastrophe” is both headache-inducing brainrot and a certified bop. The verses? Kind of poetic. The hooks? Irritating but still catchy. The production? It goes harder than any kids’ soundtrack song has the right to.

Duff brings unexpected depth to “CATastrophe,” proudly owning her self-induced chaos and using her messiness to make life fun. But then she compares her traits to a feline’s, because this is The Cat in the Hat, after all. That said, even Dr. Seuss himself couldn’t write a lyric as great as “Hey, I got nine lives, let’s live one up tonight.”

Meanwhile, KATSEYE is probably annoyed they didn’t come up with the chorus first, especially since it’s all literal cat puns like “kitty cat energy” and “let the cat out the bag,” plus those annoying “na na na”s you’d hear in the background of a pet food commercial. Shakespeare could never.

Like “CATastrophe” itself, the music video is a total fever dream, with Duff escaping into an Alice in Wonderland-like dreamscape that cats would have a field day in. But she has her eyes on the prize, incorporating Easter eggs for her newest album luck... or something with boxes that nod to “Weather For Tennis” and “Holiday Party.”

She even winks to her first-ever single, which also happened to be for a film soundtrack, The Lizzie McGuire Movie. “Some chaos in my eyes to the tune of ‘why not?’,” she sings in the first verse. And when you think about it, “CATastrophe” is kind of the older but brattier sister of “Why Not.” Fifteen-year-old Duff walked with “Why not take a crazy chance?” so the 39-year-old singer could run with “Let's make a mess, who cares if you're mad at me?”