Mariah Carey’s Secret Grunge Album Could Still Be Released

We still haven’t forgotten about Mariah Carey’s secret grunge album — and she hasn’t either!

In an interview with Saturday Night Live star Bowen Yang and comedian Matt Rogers on their podcast Las Culturistas from iHeartMedia and Will Ferrell’s Big Money Players Network, Carey was reminded that there’s still an audience waiting for her long-lost grunge album.

“Can you drop that grunge album?” Rogers asked.

“I know, right?” Carey, 55, replied. “I’m so mad that I haven’t done that yet … but who do I drop it with?”

Bowen and Rogers jokingly toyed with the idea of making their own label and suggested the “chic” idea of releasing it on “Garage Band or something, like, a grungy thing.”

“I could do that. It’s a good album,” Carey said.

In 1995, as Carey was recording what would become her hit album Daydream, the R&B icon quietly recorded a grunge album. Despite being in the peak of the alt-rock boom in the mid-’90s, record label executives didn’t want her name attached to the project.

“I got kind of in trouble for making this album—the alternative album—because back then, everything was super-controlled by the powers that be,” Carey explained in an interview with Zane Lowe on Apple Music 1 in 2020. “I never really was like, ‘Oh, we’re going to release it.’ But then I was like, I should release it. I should do it under an alias. Let people discover it and whatever, but that got squashed.”

Inspired by her struggling marriage to Tommy Mottola (whom she’d go on to divorce two years after the album was recorded) and bands like Hole and Sleater-Kinney, Carey recorded what would become Eel Tree’s Somebody’s Ugly Daughter.

“I was playing with the style of the breezy-grunge, punk-light white female singers who were popular at the time. You know the ones who seemed to be so carefree with their feelings and their image,” she wrote in her 2020 memoir The Meaning of Mariah Carey. “They could be angry, angsty, and messy, with old shoes, wrinkled slips, and unruly eyebrows, while every move I made was so calculated and manicured. I wanted to break free, let loose, and express my misery — but I also wanted to laugh.”

Her longtime producer Walter Afanasieff told Pitchfork that Sony Music allegedly renamed the band to Chick, made Carey change the explicit lyrics, and brought in her friend Clarissa Dane to handle lead vocals. Carey’s background vocals remained and she was credited as “D. Sue.”

In 2022, Carey revealed that the original recordings of Somebody’s Ugly Daughter with her as lead vocalist still exist. “This was my outlet, and nobody knew about it. Most people, I’d rather they don’t even know about it until we decide exactly what happens from that quest of finding those vocals,” she said in an interview with Rolling Stone Music Now.

“I had no freedom during that time. That was my freedom,” she explained. “I would drive around with my assistant with the top down in upstate New York, and we’d be screaming the lyrics of these songs that nobody else knew.”

Physical copies of the officially released Chick album exist secondhand, but the album is still not on streaming. Two songs, “Demented” and “Malibu,” are available online with music videos.