Hilary Duff on her new album, Taylor Swift and that toxic mom group drama

A sparkly pink electric guitar hangs on a wall of the recording studio where Hilary Duff made her new album. The cozy, gear-filled joint near the Van Nuys Airport belongs to her husband, Matthew Koma, who produced “Luck… or Something,” the singer and actor’s first LP in more than a decade. But as Duff points out on a recent afternoon, the paisley-print guitar is all hers.

“I got it for my 16th birthday,” she says proudly — a gift from the Fender company. “I found it in the storage unit and Matt was like, ‘Oh, that’s going up there.’”

Before Miley Cyrus, before Sabrina Carpenter, before Olivia Rodrigo, Duff arrived in the early 2000s as a Disney kid with pop-idol ambitions. She broke out in the endearingly awkward title role of the Disney Channel’s “Lizzie McGuire” then went on to star in family-friendly movies like “Agent Cody Banks” and “Cheaper by the Dozen.” By the time she received that guitar, she’d topped the Billboard 200 with her album “Metamorphosis,” which sold 4 million copies and spawned hit singles like “So Yesterday” and “Come Clean.”

Duff stepped away from music for most of her 20s to focus on acting and starting a family. (An attempted comeback album in 2015, “Breathe In. Breathe Out.,” didn’t really go anywhere.) Now, at 38, she’s returned with a bracingly honest record full of the texture and detail of her life as a wife, sister and mother of four.

In frank yet wordy songs that layer guitars and synths over shimmering grooves, Duff sings about trying to overcome old habits and about her fear that her best times are behind her. “We Don’t Talk” appears to address her estrangement from her older sister, Haylie, while “Weather for Tennis” describes her tendency to keep the peace as a child of divorce. In “Holiday Party,” she recounts a recurring dream in which Koma cheats on her with her friends.

“I wake up in a rage and he’s like, ‘I didn’t do anything!’” she says with a laugh. “And I’m like, ‘But you want to.’ A lot of this stuff came out of the hormonal boom of: I’ve just had a baby and I’m nursing and I’m trying to get my two feet back on the ground again.” (Duff and Koma have three daughters aged 7, 4 and 1, while Duff shares a 13-year-old son with her ex-husband, former hockey player Mike Comrie.)

Asked how he hopes the album fares commercially, Koma says, “I don’t [care]. Public perception or sales, that’s all cool, but it’s a separate experience from why we did it.” The producer, who’s known for his work with Zedd and Shania Twain, adds, “The whole purpose was to make something that Hilary could feel good about stepping into.”

Yet early-2000s nostalgia led to a recent run of sold-out theater gigs, and this summer it’ll carry her into arenas around the world, including Inglewood’s Kia Forum on July 8 and 9. (Less happily for Duff, it also made a viral sensation of an essay in the Cut by her fellow millennial Ashley Tisdale in which Tisdale wrote about leaving a “toxic mom group” that allegedly included Duff and Mandy Moore.)

Curled on a sofa in the studio’s control room, Duff says, “I’m finally at this place where I’m zero percent ashamed of my past and any of the things that used to embarrass me” — one reason she made the bold choice to open her set at the Wiltern last month with two of her biggest hits, “Wake Up” and “So Yesterday.”

After those songs came “Roommates,” perhaps the most vulnerable track on Duff’s new album. It’s about navigating a dry patch in a marriage, and the language is as vivid as it is unsparing: “I only want the beginning / I don’t want the end,” she sings, adding that she longs to be in the “back of a dive bar, giving you h—.”

A surprising word choice.
How would you have said it? Sometimes you need to make the lyrics fit — you need it to rhyme with something. [Laughs] It’s meant to be polarizing because it’s such a desperate plea. I can say I haven’t actually given h— in the back of a dive bar. But it’s just trying to capture the feeling of a time when you felt alive.

Like all teen stars, you had to figure out how to grow up and talk about sex as a public figure. Now there’s the idea that it’s better left to the young.
I finally feel like I know a lot about sex. My whole 20s, sex was not always enjoyable — it was so much to figure out. Now I finally understand it. Maybe that’s a female thing, but I’m not ready to be put out to pasture. People come up to me all the time and they’re like, “Wow, you aged really well.” I’m like, “I’m only 38! Just because you’ve known me since I was 9…”

You’re handling senior citizenship well.
When do I start getting the discounts? I feel like 38 is not old, although when I thought about my parents at 40, they looked so different than we look now.

I always stop at those TikToks where it shows what 35 looked like in 1982.
I don’t think anyone drank water back then. They were, like, dusty-crusty.

Hilary Duff, left, and Matthew Koma at Apple Music Studios in Los Angeles in December.

(Amy Sussman / Getty Images for Apple Music)

You borrow the chorus of Blink-182’s “Dammit” for your song “Growing Up.” Why?
Blink is one of my favorite bands. I remember getting my driver’s license, and that was what was playing on my iPod. “Growing Up” is such a deeply personal song to me, talking about sitting in the backyard with one of my best friends and just needing to drink too much wine and unload about life. But it also feels like a love letter to my fans. I don’t like saying that word, but I genuinely feel like I’ve had fans for 25 years, and getting to see them now in adulthood — I didn’t know I was going to have this opportunity.

What’s the problem with “fan”?
It puts me on a pedestal that makes me feel uncomfortable. If you were to talk to Matt or someone close to me, they’d probably say, “Hilary doesn’t understand what she’s meant to some people.” And I think that’s true. When I think of myself, I’m not like a grand pop star — I feel more like a woman of the people.

A woman of the people?
Am I allowed to say that? [Laughs] Is that offensive in any way? My feet hit the ground in the morning, and I’ve got a million things to do. Sometimes my baby’s still sleeping. And I have a teenager to get ready for school that we’re always all waiting on.

Why do you have four children?
I know — we’re sick.

Did you expect to have four?
I thought I would have at least three. I always wanted a big family because I come from a super small family and I always wanted more siblings. I had Luca obviously pre-Matt, and then we had Banks before we got married. Then the pandemic hit — we had a pandemic baby like everybody else. The fourth was just a crazy-a— decision. Matt was like, “Everybody’s gonna think we’re really Christ-y if we go for No. 4.” We also have three dogs, two cats and eight chickens.

As two artists, how do you sort out the work of child-rearing?
I don’t know if I’ve actually said this out loud — to Matt I have for sure — but I think that part of my wanting to make a record was coming out of having my fourth child. I love motherhood, obviously — I wouldn’t have four kids if I didn’t. But I think I felt really jealous that he got to go to work every day and just be alone with his thoughts. I was like, I need to stretch. That’s what it felt like after the fourth baby: I’m either gonna lose myself completely and just become a stay-at-home mom and wait for the phone to ring, or I’m gonna go make something that moves me.

You don’t need me to tell you that our culture is always happy to make moms feel guilty. Was it a journey to accept that it’s OK to do something for yourself?
That’s what the healthy part of the brain says. But the other part that’s wired to be with the children you birthed — sometimes that part overshadows it. And it’s very hard to fight that. I could probably cry right now thinking about all the things I’m gonna miss this year.

Hilary Duff in the studio where she recorded her new album.

(Jay L Clendenin / For The Times)

You’ve got a line in “Roommates” where you say, “Life is life-ing and pressure is pressuring me.” At the shows you just played, did you think of your audience as being at the same place in life as you?
For sure. When they were scream-singing it back to me, I was like, “Oh, you know.” That doesn’t mean you have to be a parent. “Life is life-ing” is the bills and the monotony and the traffic and the family — it’s all the things. I knew that if it’s bumping around inside my head, and I’ve been living a pretty normal life for 10 years — normal as I can get — then people would see themselves in it.

Twenty-five years ago, you were playing to 10-year-olds. Would a 10-year-old today be interested in your new songs?
I don’t think so. But I mean, I used to sing Natalie Imbruglia’s “Torn” all the time, and I had no idea what it was about.

The last decade has been a golden age for young female songwriters: Taylor Swift, Billie Eilish, Olivia Rodrigo.
You forgot Chappell Roan.

“Luck… or Something” feels aligned with that deepening craft. But maybe your early stuff felt sophisticated to you.
I don’t think the intent back then was sophisticated songwriting. There was no Taylor Swift yet — it’s like before Christ and after Christ.

She changed the game?
On all the levels.

How’d you end up on Atlantic Records? I wondered whether this was a product of personal friendships — the Elliot Grainge and Sofia Richie and Good Charlotte of it all.
We’re more personally friends with them now. I finished making the record and for the first time ever was like, “It’s done — do you like it?”

You weren’t looking for notes from the label.
I’m not saying I didn’t have meetings with A&R. But pretty much the record was created, and that was that. I didn’t go shopping anywhere else, which was fantastic because I hate a dog-and-pony show.

Did you feel like you’d been chewed up by the record industry in any way?
After “Breathe In. Breathe Out.,” it was very easy to be like, “RCA forced me to lead with this song when I knew it should’ve been this song.” But that was me not having [courage], you know what I mean? It was a joint effort of [messing] it up. But I learned a lot from that. I don’t think I would’ve made this record if I hadn’t fumbled the ball a little.

The story about the toxic mom group blew up just as you were launching this album. Did that experience give you pause about reentering the pop world?
I mean, this is not new for me. I’ve had this since I was maybe 15 and starting to get followed around by paparazzi. Everything starts getting documented and everyone knows my life and all the players in it. So the stories that get news pickup — it’s not what happens to a normal person who maybe became an actor as an adult. And now it’s escalated by the talking heads on TikTok that need clickbait. It’s hard because you’re like, “Wait, whoa, that person kind of got it right,” and “Whoa that person doesn’t know what they’re talking about.” I saw something that was like, “None of the moms at school actually like her and neither do the teachers,” and I was like, “First of all…”

Is it hard or easy for you to tune out —
By the way, the women at school are lovely and I’m obsessed with all of them.

But can you ignore the chatter about you on social media?
It just depends on the day. Knowing that I get to open up the backdoors and play soccer as a family and take a hot tub and go get our chicken eggs — that’s the purpose of life. On the days when crazy s— happens, I go home and quiet the noise.