Mariah Carey Teases Grunge Album With “#notyet” Reply

Mariah Carey answered another call for her unreleased grunge album with a new hint during her Reddit “Ask Me Anything” on Friday, October 30.

“I get asked this about once a week,” she wrote when a fan asked about the album. “my answer is…#notyet (this is a hint!)”

The reply left the timing open. Carey gave no release date for her version of Someone’s Ugly Daughter, the rock project she made while recording Daydream in 1995.

A version of that album already came out under the name Chick, with her friend Clarissa Dane on lead vocals. The recordings fans have been asking Carey to release feature Carey singing lead. She discussed the secret project in her 2020 memoir.

That difference goes back to the label pressure around the record. As AllHipHop previously reported, executives worried about what the rock detour would do to her mainstream image. Carey recorded her original leads as “D. Sue,” then took a background vocal role.

The music gave her room to work outside those limits. On “Las Culturistas” in 2024, she described the sessions in terms of the freedom she lacked elsewhere in her career.

“I had no freedom during that time. That was my freedom,” Carey said during that earlier interview with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang.

She also told the hosts, “You will hear it,” while asking who could help put the album out. The question of recovering her original vocals had come up before: in a 2022 “Rolling Stone Music Now” interview, she discussed recordings that had been shelved and still needed to be found.

Friday’s Reddit conversation took place around a different visit to her archives. Her first AMA in r/popculturechat was set for 3:27 P.M. Eastern and marked the 25th anniversary of Glitter. The expanded digital edition arrived that day with 15 additional tracks, while the album returned to vinyl for the first time since 2001.

Those additions included a 1997 version of “Lead The Way,” a Carey-only version of “Want You” and a rough demo of “Never Too Far.” The anniversary collection also included new collaborations with Channel Tres and Rochelle Jordan.