Hilary Duff has sent fans into a frenzy with the release of her first song in a decade.
On Thursday, the former Disney Channel darling, 38, released her new single, “Mature.”
The track — which features lyrics like, “She looks / like she could be your daughter / like me before I got smarter” — serves as Duff’s reflection on a past relationship with a partner who moved on to a younger woman.
“‘Mature’ speaks to my mature self calling my not so mature self on the phone many years ago, and she’s letting her know we landed softly,” the Lizzie McGuire star wrote on Instagram.
“This was a brief time with a lover that left me with so many questions… It felt like a good place to start. How are we feeling… Mature?”
The song, which comes 10 years after the 2015 release of Duff’s most recent album, Breathe In. Breath Out., has already become an earworm for many fans, who have declared: “The queen of pop is back.”
“Well, it’s about time!” one said on X. “If anyone can bring back a bit of fun and cheekiness, it’s Hilary. I’ll have that on repeat with a cuppa in hand!”
“She came back and the song is actually good,” a second praised. “She’s effortlessly talented.”
“ITS A FREAKING BOP,” a third agreed, while a fourth found that “a comeback single like this shows her evolution as an artist while maintaining her signature style.”
“Hillary [sic] Duff goes petty with this one I’m here for it,” another applauded.
“Hilary Duff you ATE!!” someone else praised, with another adding, “‘Mature’ feels like the perfect title for this new era.”
Duff rose to fame as the star of Disney Channel’s comedy series Lizzie McGuire. During its four-year run from 2001 to 2004, she also starred in a string of family movies, including Disney Channel hits The Lizzie McGuire Movie and Cadet Kelly, as well as feature films Agent Cody Banks and Cheaper by the Dozen.
Meanwhile, she released a handful of albums: Santa Claus Lane (2002), Metamorphosis (2003), Hilary Duff (2004) and Dignity (2007), as well as her latest, Breath In. Breathe Out. (2015).
“Making music was a huge risk that I took at such a young age, and it was a huge part of my makeup for the longest time,” Duff said in a new interview with Vogue. “It was hard to step away from it, but I always knew I would come back whenever the timing felt right.”
In recent years, she starred opposite Sutton Foster in TV Land’s seven-season sitcom Younger, and most recently led the short-lived How I Met Your Mother spinoff, How I Met Your Father.
Last year, she also welcomed her fourth child, daughter Townes, with her husband, singer-songwriter Matthew Koma. The pair, who’ve been married since 2019, share two other daughters: Banks, seven, and Mae, four. Duff shares her oldest child, son Luca, 13, with her ex-husband, Mike Comrie.
Of her long-awaited return to music, Duff told podcaster Jake Shane, 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 added.
“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,” Duff said. “Finally, I felt safe enough and comfortable in my own family to step outside and open that part of myself up again.”
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