Musical Digest: Hilary Duff "Mature"

This year is full of surprises--equally good and bad.

Musically we didn't get a summer song. We witnessed a feud between two pop queens having to choose between le showgirl et le 365 party girl. We also did not see any hip hop entries on the Billboard Top 40...

In the words of Regina George, "What is happening to the world?"

When Hilary Duff announced her return to pop music later this year, our nostalgic millennial souls fluttered like the blue butterflies on Metamorphosis back in 2003. Has she single handedly come back to save the music industry? Are we going to let her down like we did with "Sparks"?

The highly anticipated single "Mature" premiered November 6th, 2025 after a decade away from the music scene.

Let me preface by saying that I grew up being a huge Hilary Duff fan.

Sure, I binged Lizzie McGuire on Disney Channel and sure, I owned all of her discography from that time period. I bought some of the paraphernalia from Stuff by Hilary Duff and you best believe I spritzed myself with the With Love perfume...I even had the fragranced lotion to go with it. "Diginity" was Hilary's periwinkle bohemian era and it spoke to me the most...vocally, aesthetically, and of course lyrically because I understood how badly Hilary wanted to break away from that squeaky clean Disney image and "Dignity" was such a classy way to do it. It was sexy, but not being so annoyingly pushy circa Miley Cyrus' "Can't Be Tamed"...

Fast forward to a decade later and I couldn't wait to press play...but what I heard broke my heart.

I wanted to go into this musical digest worshipping the ground that Hilary Duff walks on. I wanted to be completely blown away. I wanted to be completely flabbergasted and enamored by this comeback...but I'm not. I always have a hard time debating whether to be brutally honest about how I feel about a particular song or whether to scrap it all together...let the silence fill in the blanks, but I'd be doing myself and my readers a disservice.

The premise and concept of the record is beautiful where Hilary is watching and almost talking to her younger self; “She looks like all of your girls but blonder/A little like me, but younger” and this is mostly showcased through the music video directed by Lauren Dunn.

But today we're going to focus on the sound and the reason why I'm disappointed at it.

In a pop world full of authentically talented vocalists such as Ariana Grande, Joanna "JoJo" Levesque, and of course...Dua Lipa...where does Hilary Duff get the nerve?

Perhaps I'm not mature enough for this revival, but there's a definite shift in tone. Her vocals sound noticeably different, processed and lower toned. The vocals are heavily filtered; not auto tuned in the way that Charlie XCX makes it look cool and effortless, but more like a cheap karaoke night at a dive bar in Wicker Park (and even that can sound significantly better) and it loses the natural texture and emotion in her tone. The delivery is flat. There's almost no energy to it.

Quintessentially the essence of "Girl, give us nothing"

Her voice sits in a lower register and feels so far away, but I also think it shows in the way that it sounds emotionally distant. It's meant to be a discourse between the past self with the present self, but it couldn't have been anything further from it.

In an interview with Jake Shane, she revealed that she has always felt a connection with her fans and now feels comfortable enough to step outside of her familial bubble and reconnect with fans again.

As a devoted fan for years, I couldn't feel further away from her. It's not that I don't care about her...her pop culture essence has influenced much of my adolescent life, but there's no spark, there's no emotion, there's not even a tear that I'd like to shed.

She has had ten years to work on her vocals and her stage presence and she gave us n o t h i n g.

Useless and disappointing.