A few years ago Noah Cyrus had a hallelujah moment while rummaging in a thrift store. Her eyes alighted on a T-shirt bearing the likeness of a figure she had known from childhood. She snapped it up and was rocking the top when paparazzi caught up with her soon afterwards.
“Garth Brooks and my dad kind of came up around the same time,” says Cyrus, daughter of the Achy Breaky Heart star Billy Ray Cyrus and younger sister of the pop wrecking ball Miley Cyrus. “I’ve heard so much of his music and so many stories as well. He’s legendary. Isn’t he? So I was searching and I found that T-shirt with his picture. I was, like, ‘This is a must-have.’”
Imagine Billie Eilish’s Happier Than Ever spliced with the drug memoir Requiem for a Dream, all relayed by an artist who grew up under the spotlight of megafame
She smiles as she says this — a rare flash of levity from an artist who has been through the lockdown wars and sings through her woes on her astonishing new album, The Hardest Part.
Part break-up project, part addiction memoir, the record is a journey through the dark side of pop. Imagine Billie Eilish’s Happier Than Ever spliced with the drug memoir Requiem for a Dream, all relayed by an artist who grew up under the spotlight of megafame. Searing and unsparing, it’s a raw gut punch of an LP.
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“When I turned 20 I was overcome / With the thought that I might not turn 21,” Cyrus sings on the opening track, Noah (Stand Still) — and from there it’s a long, deep dive as Cyrus reckons with her split from her boyfriend Diego Leanos, aka the rapper Lil Xan, and with her spiral into prescription-medication dependency.
Musically we’re a long way from Achy Breaky Heart — and even from the stridency of her sister’s hits. Starting with her 2016 single, Make Me (Cry) — a collaboration with the Euphoria soundtrack composer Labrinth — Noah has steered a more esoteric course.
A bruising wonkiness runs through her music, as is clear from song titles such as I Got So High That I Saw Jesus. In her lyrics she is unflinching. Hardest Part, from her new record, honestly discusses her relationship with her father, chronicling a visit to the family farm in Tennessee. “The hardest part of going home,” she sings, “is facing that you’re getting older.”
The heartbreak of being in a relationship with someone you can never really know is the subject of perhaps the new album’s hardest-hitting — and also catchiest — song, Mr Percocet. (Percocet is a brand of opioid medication.) “I barely recognise you when you wake up in the morning / Must be someone else’s eyes that I look into every night.”
“Lockdown was a hard time,” says Cyrus. “For everybody. Everybody was forced into self-isolation. And a lot had been separated from their loved ones and hadn’t seen them in however long. Some people have lost relatives or family or friends throughout Covid. It was very lonely. For me personally, it gave me an excuse, or opportunity, to further myself in isolation even further than I had already been. And deeper into my substance abuse. And further into this relationship I was in at the time.”
Cyrus was born in January 2000, so missed her father’s heyday as a global star. She was still a child when Miley, who is just over seven years older than her, was transitioning, sometimes quite messily, from Hannah Montana, Disney’s all-American sweetheart, to a figure of some tabloid notoriety, ultimately becoming a wigged-out collaborator with the psychedelic weirdos The Flaming Lips.
This was a lot for the young Noah to witness. And she confesses it did initially put her off a career in music. Was it worth the media baggage? The prurient obsession with her personal life? Perhaps not.
“I think for a while it was something I did not want,” she says. “As I got older and started writing music, I think I just fell in love with it. And then I made the choice to want to do so.”
I’ve been in a public family my entire life. Of course, with music and opening myself up, the opportunity for hate or for people misjudging, whatever, is out of my control completely. That’s something I’ve had to learn to be okay with
She has been reading about herself and her family — on gossip sites, in the tabloids and, of course, on social media — since childhood. So she was aware that, in singing so honestly about her struggles with Xanax, a medication used to treat anxiety, and the dark place where it left her, she was leaving herself exposed. She shrugs: it’s fine. It’s how it has always been.
“That’s maybe been happening my entire life. And that’s something that I know I can’t stop. Unless I simply didn’t exist. That is something that comes with me walking this earth. I’ve been in a public family my entire life. Of course, with music and opening myself up, the opportunity for hate or for people misjudging, whatever, is out of my control completely. That’s something I’ve had to learn to be okay with.”
She spiralled hard through the lockdown. But then she got a new manager, Mookie Singerman, who also works with the singer Caroline Polachek. It was Singerman who connected her with the Irish producer Mike Crossey, a collaborator with Arctic Monkeys, The 1975 and The Killers. She and Crossey hit it off instantly — in the Irishman she felt she was working with someone she could trust and share her vulnerable lyrics with. It was the making of her and her new album.
Mike Crossey completely saved my life in a way, because I needed something good to focus on. I had already just had such a toxic relationship not only with substance abuse but with another person. It was time for me to focus on me and my lyrics
“When we got in the room I realised that we were going to have such an instant connection. Mike Crossey completely saved my life in a way, because I needed something good to focus on. Something good to give my time and energy to and something good to fall in love with. I had already just had such a toxic relationship not only with substance abuse but with another person. It was time for me to focus on me and my lyrics.”
Even though The Hardest Part is an extraordinary album, Cyrus is all too aware that some will dismiss it because of who she is, because of her celebrity background. She shrugs again: this is something with which she made peace a long time ago. Out of the darkness, towards the light, she’s forging towards a new horizon.
“That bothered me for so long. It’s inevitable. You become desensitised from it. You don’t let it get to you.”
The Hardest Part is released by Records Label/Columbia
