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She’s stepping back into the spotlight.
Hilary Duff has officially returned with her new single “Mature,” which was released Thursday night and marks her first piece of new music in a decade.
Duff teased “Mature” hours before its release with a short clip from the song’s music video on Instagram.
“8PM EST. Be there,” she captioned the clip alongside the cocktail, sparkle and cherry emojis.
“Mature” features raunchy lyrics not previously heard in the Disney Channel alum’s earlier songs.
“She’s me, I’m her in a different font / Just a few years younger, a new haircut / Very Leo of you with your Scorpio touch / Now, now,” she sings in the first verse. “Going down on her on your vintage rug / Bet she’s so impressed by your Basquiat / And she thinks you’re deep in the ways you’re not / Now, now.”
“She looks / Like all of your girls but blonder / A little like me, just younger / Bet she loves when she hears you say / ‘You’re so mature for your agе, babe,'” she continued in the chorus. “She looks / Like shе could be your daughter / Like me before I got smarter / When I was flattered to hear you say / ‘You’re so mature for your age, babe,’ oh.”
Duff opened up about her long-awaited return during an interview with Jake Shane for his “Therapuss” podcast Wednesday.
“It was always going to happen,” she said. “There’s no way that that was not going to be a part of my story.”
After 10 years away from music, and after reflecting on her life at 38 years old, Duff said that she was “ready to fill in the blanks and share with people and connect with them on the level of now.”
“Obviously, it’s taken a lot of twists and turns and ups and downs and all of those things, but I have this crazy connection with fans that I’ve known since I was nine, 10 years old, and I just want to connect with them again,” she explained.
“We have gone through a lot of the same things – whether that’s complicated relationships, anxiety, raising kids, divorces, trying to find yourself in adulthood, family drama,” she added. “Finally, I felt safe enough and comfortable in my own family to step outside and open that part of myself up again.”
Elsewhere during the interview, Duff opened up about her new single.
She described “Mature” as “self-talking to my younger self about an experience that we had and just reflecting on it, and being okay with it and having a little tongue-in-cheek moment with yourself and accepting your past and being good with where you landed.”
The “Younger” star added that the song’s music video was “the journey of the two me’s meeting” and highlighted a “sweet butterfly moment” that has remained an important theme for her since 2003’s “Metamorphosis.”
Duff announced her “highly anticipated return to music” after a 10-year hiatus earlier this year.
In a statement released on Sept. 9, the former Disney Channel star revealed that she signed with Atlantic Records to release her first album since “Breathe In. Breathe Out.”
But that wasn’t the only surprise Duff had in store for her patient fans, because she also announced an upcoming docuseries that will chronicle her “long-awaited musical return and personal journey” by “offering an unfiltered vignette into Hilary’s world.”
“Embracing the ups, downs, and everything in between, fans will ride shotgun as she balances raising a family, recording new music, live show rehearsals and preparing to perform on stage for the first time in over a decade,” the press release read.
The “Cinderella Story” star took to Instagram that same day to tease her long-awaited return to music further.
“New music … or something,” she wrote alongside three photos from inside a recording studio.
Duff first got popular as the star of Disney Channel’s “Lizzie McGuire” in 2002. She kicked off her music career that same year with the release of the holiday album “Santa Claus Lane.”
However, it wasn’t until Duff’s 2003 record “Metamorphosis” that she became a pop star with songs like “So Yesterday” and “Come Clean.”
“Hilary Duff,” the actress-turned-singer’s self-titled album, was released one year later and included the popular tracks “Fly” and “Someone’s Watching Over Me.”
Following the compilation album “Most Wanted” in 2005, which included the songs “Wake Up” and “Beat of My Heart,” Duff released “Dignity” in 2007.
Her third original studio album turned fans on to singles like “With Love” and “Stranger” and marked the singer’s shift to a more dance-pop sound.
After “Dignity,” Duff took a short break from recording to focus on acting and other projects before returning eight years later with 2015’s “Breathe In Breathe Out.” The album included the single “Sparks.”
Following “Breath In Breathe Out,” Duff took another break from music, which lasted until the release of “Mature” this week.
The actress-turned-pop star previously discussed why she decided to take a step back from music during an interview with Access Hollywood in December 2023.
At the time, she said that she had her hands full juggling acting with being a mom of four.
Duff shares son Luca, 13, with ex-husband Mike Comrie. She also has daughters Banks, 6, Mae, 4, and Townes, 18 months, with her current husband, Matthew Koma.
She starred in the sitcom “Younger” from its premiere in 2015 to its finale in 2021, as well as “How I Met Your Father” for its two-season run from 2022 to 2023.
“I always am thinking about it,” she explained two years ago. “I never wanna blame my kids for this, but I’m so immersed in motherhood right now, and it’s so much easier to book an acting job and be like, ‘Okay, I have to be at work at 6 a.m. and then I’m gonna be done by 9 tonight and then I’m gonna be home.’”
“I am in the middle of my real life, and that is very much a part of not my real life, like, from my past,” she continued. “So, I have to just figure out a way for those two things to meet.”
But the “How I Met Your Father” star knew she would return to music eventually.
“I really do believe that I’ll just one day be like, ‘I have to do it,’” Duff explained. “There’s going to be something that comes over me, and just like, I have to do it.”
“So, it’s gonna happen,” she concluded at the time. “I just don’t know when.”
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