While SZA missed the opportunity to call “Kill Bill” “Mature” (after all, she does keep repeating, “I’m so mature” throughout it), Hilary Duff knew that the latter title was for her. And, after ten years spent away from making music, Duff has certainly grown more mature indeed. In fact, stepping away from music was her mature decision back in 2015, after releasing the relatively successful but still much too underappreciated Breathe In. Breathe Out. And it was hardly a coincidence that, just as her next wildly popular series, Younger, started to air the same year (continuing for six seasons and ending in 2019), Duff pulled back from recording new music.
In the past few years, however, fans of her musical side have been clamoring to hear new material, with Duff at last meeting the demand by recording an amuse-bouche of a single that signals her upcoming sixth record. And yes, like Lily Allen with West End Girl, Duff’s long break from the musical spotlight has allowed many to better appreciate her latest offering. To truly bask in and savor it knowing full well that Duff is no longer a “churner-outer” when it comes to making music. Granted, the eight-year break she took between the release of Dignity and Breathe In. Breathe Out. was already an indication of her decision to “refocus” her life. This in no small part thanks to beginning a relationship with NHL player Mike Comrie, who Duff married in 2010 and had a son with in 2012. Two years later, the pair announced their separation (with the divorce finalized in 2016). And no, it hardly seemed a coincidence that, just as she abandoned her married life, her work life started to accelerate again, with the recording of a new album and starring in a new show.
And then, as though to adhere to a kind of pattern, Duff started to “fall off” again when she married singer-songwriter Matthew Koma at the end of 2019. Indeed, the pair wasted no time in having three kids together, which has kept Duff plenty busy—in addition to infusing her maturity with new depths. Even so, despite all of her growth since the era when she rose to prominence at just thirteen years old (thanks to Lizzie McGuire), it doesn’t mean Duff is above shading someone who did her wrong. That person, in this case, is none other than Joel Madden. Best known as being the lead singer of Good Charlotte and Nicole Richie’s husband (as well as Cameron Diaz’s brother-in-law), the two dated at a time when it was still barely an eyebrow raise for young women in Hollywood to date inappropriately older men. The same went for Duff’s erstwhile 00s “rival” and fellow Disney darling, Lindsay Lohan, dating Wilmer Valderrama, six years her senior when she was seventeen (which is why the two didn’t unveil their relationship until after Lohan’s eighteenth birthday in 2004). But the relationship between Duff and Madden was more inappropriate still as a result of their scandalous eight-year age difference, with Madden having just turned twenty-five when he began dating the still sixteen-year-old Duff in the summer of 2004 (what is it about 2004 and unseemly age gaps?).
Which is why, when Duff told Vogue that “Mature” is “definitely about a brief experience that I had a long, long time ago,” it made Madden seem like an apparent inspiration, with Duff further adding, “It was extremely therapeutic to write about things that a normal conversation doesn’t really give you the opportunity to.” And yes, another chanteuse that would tend to agree with that is Taylor Swift, whose lyrical stylings and lashings toward an ex are all over this single. Particularly when comparing Duff’s lyrics, “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’” to Swift’s in both the Jake Gyllenhaal-aimed “All Too Well” (“And I was never good at tellin’ jokes, but the punch line goes/’I’ll get older, but your lovers stay my age’”) and the John Mayer-aimed “Would’ve Could’ve Should’ve” (“Give me back my girlhood, it was mine first”).
Like Swift, Duff, too, has plenty of cad-ish exes to draw from when it comes to the inspiration behind the track, with Jason Walsh also being another speculated part of the “mood board” that spurred these lyrics. This primarily due to the zodiac callout, “Very Leo [as in DiCaprio] of you with your Scorpio touch” (and yes, conveniently, DiCaprio is a Scorpio). This kind of astrological “Easter egg-ing” is also something Lana Del Rey also did on “Chemtrails Over the Country Club” by making a direct reference to Sean Larkin with the line, “You’re born in December and I’m born in June” (after already mentioning of herself, “My moon’s in Leo, my Cancer is sun”). But Duff is just getting started on taking this fuckboy to task, also goading, “Bet she’s so impressed by your Basquiat/And she thinks you’re deep in the ways you’re not.” This lyric being more of the Sabrina Carpenter persuasion (think the “Dumb & Poetic” verse: “Gold star for highbrow manipulation/And ‘love everyone’ is your favorite quotation/Try to come off like you’re soft and well-spoken/Jack off to lyrics by Leonard Cohen”).
In the accompanying video for “Mature,” directed by Lauren Dunn, Duff sits in front of a vanity mirror. In truth, there are a lot of similarities to Britney Spears’ opening to the “Circus” video here, which why not, what with Spears being a fellow millennial icon that Duff’s husband, Matthew Koma, has also worked with in the past (what’s more, there’s also another “Britney video moment” via a certain kind of overhead shot of Duff lying on a flower that recalls Spears in “Oops!…I Did It Again”). Except that, rather than the camera hovering just a little longer than necessary on shots of Spears’ Curious and Fantasy perfume bottles and a Bvlgari necklace, it does so on a shot of peonies. So perhaps the intent with that is to remind that, at this point in her life, Duff is experiencing the happiness, love and romance (all things that peonies are said to represent) that she didn’t have in their most mature forms when she was younger. And dating men like Madden was part of that. A man who does happen to date a lot of blonde women (though Richie is actually older than Duff). And someone that Duff admitted to losing her virginity to back in 2015 when she said, “I had a twenty-six-year-old boyfriend. So everyone can make their own assumptions about what I was doing.” Along with, “I had a pretty serious relationship at a young age that I ended, and it wrecked me for a good year and a half.”
It seems, however, that Duff is still working out some of that long-buried “wreckage” on this song, also burning this composite ex with, “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’” and “You dim all the lights so you look real wise/As they trace the lines underneath your eyes/And mistake your charm for a cosmic sign.”
And so it is that Duff’s latest, like Lily Allen’s, is also being deemed a work of “autofiction,” with Vogue even asking her point-blank, “Have you heard the new Lily Allen record?” to which Duff replied, “I have listened to most of it, and it’s so refreshing to hear someone just sing about what they feel and not censor themself to please anyone.” Duff appears to be on that tip as well, describing her single as “speak[ing] 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. This was a brief time with a love that left me with so many questions. It felt like a good place to start.”
As for the concept behind the video, which focuses largely on Duff performing for an audience of one—herself—while wearing a Bob Mackie-esque gown and reverting to the “pop star mode” she once made second nature in the 2000s, Duff remarked to Vogue, “It was important to me that the video felt like a performance instead of just laying out the story of the lyrics. I wanted it to feel slightly meta, where it shows this girl in the audience watching herself sorta ‘perform’ back to her. I wanted to get across that idea of looking at some of the more performative elements of your prior self: was it ever authentic, or were you always putting on a show for someone?” Existential indeed. Which is what pop has been missing of late (though, between Duff, Allen and ROSALÍA, that’s definitely changing). Along with a playful sense of self-referencing (because when Swift does that, it reads less as playful, and more as narcissistic).
Something that Duff also delivers on with the final scene of the video, which finds her walking out of the theater and opening her hands to reveal a butterfly she then sets free. Needless to say, it’s a patent reference to the 2003 album that “made” her, Metamorphosis. Duff commented of the inclusion of this particular “emblem” of her career and life, “Butterflies hold a lot of strings to my past, and I wanted a nod to that first record being part of my ‘metamorphosis’ to this stage of my career. They feel very similar in ways, because they both represented new beginnings for me.”
New beginnings that seem very auspicious based on the aura of confidence and “reclaiming-the-narrative” motif she’s channeling on “Mature.” It might not be the 2000s anymore, but Duff has proven she’s much more than “just” a “tween icon” solely of that decade. Now she’s a full-grown icon in the 2020s.
