Noah Cyrus Is Everyone’s Favorite Dark Horse

Noah Cyrus was recently onstage at Madison Square Garden when she was struck by a profound sense of déjà vu. She had been in the same position in 2017, opening for Katy Perry’s Witness tour. She’d performed “Again,” a duet with the rapper XXXTentacion, which had just been released. In a clip from that concert, Cyrus is a little stiff, as if hesitant to take up too much space. 

In July, Cyrus found herself in the same place, this time supporting TikToker turned pop star Alex Warren. Nearly a decade later, “Again” has evolved into a dramatic rocker concluding with a frenzied duel between fiddle and guitar players. Cyrus, too, has changed. As her gigantic voice reached the rafters, she exuded confidence, dancing loosely in a long dress made out of lace doilies and woven with LED lights.

Early the next afternoon, Cyrus, 26, shuffles into the lobby of her Lower East Side hotel with a smile and a hug. Dressed in grey sweats and hoodie spotted with pink paw prints, she’s still glowing from the concert, which she describes as “surreal.” Playing “Again” was a particularly full-circle moment. “When I started my journey as an artist, I felt very inside of myself and afraid to let go because of the disconnect I had with my own body,” she says. “It took me a really long time and a lot of work to get to a place where I let myself be free like that on stage.”

Last year, Cyrus released her second album, I Want My Loved Ones To Go With Me. Across 10 tracks that blend soft indie folk and Americana twang, Cyrus comes to terms with the tumult that has defined much of her life and declares her own path forward. “New Country,” a collaboration with Blake Shelton, refers to some of the unique hurdles: “All these eyes on you / Waiting on you to fall / ’Cause the box they put you in just don’t fit you anymore.” 

Anyone with a cursory knowledge of Cyrus could guess a few of these boxes: nepo baby, household name but not quite, side character in someone else’s story. But a decade into her career, Cyrus has carved her own unique path, finding fans in country chart-toppers and introspective singer-songwriters alike. Her indie-tinged Americana is complemented by Little Goth on the Prairie styles from small-scale designers such as Elena Velez and home-sewers found on Etsy. Flowy and folkloric, these looks are a little rough around the edges, just like Cyrus. 

It feels strange to call Cyrus an underdog; she didn’t have it tough in the traditional sense. But public visibility is its own double-edged sword, and Cyrus has been candid about her stumbles. Perhaps dark horse is a more appropriate descriptor if we’re going with animal metaphors. Cyrus’ struggle to establish herself as an individual makes it all the more gratifying to recognize that she has arrived somewhere real. 

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Cyrus was born in Nashville, the youngest child of musician Billy Ray and talent manager Tish. In the early 1990s, her father’s cover of “Achy Breaky Heart” topped the country charts, and Cyrus spent her childhood attending his concerts. “There’s literally pictures of my dad onstage with me in one arm and a microphone in the other,” she says, a hint of Tennessee still in her voice. “Me and Miley yelling for dad all through our childhoods.” Miley would be her sister, older by 7 years — there’s also brother Braison and half-siblings Brandi and Trace. When Cyrus was 5, the family moved to Los Angeles after Miley, and then their father, was cast in the Disney Channel series Hannah Montana. The show was a massive success, and Cyrus watched as her sister became a teen icon.

Luckily, Cyrus was introduced early to one of the few people who could relate to having superstar siblings. Franklin Jonas, nicknamed the “bonus” member of his famous musical family, met Cyrus when his older brothers appeared on Hannah Montana. “Noah was my age, and she was really shy,” he says. “Fast-forward, and she was the most talkative human being that I’ve met to this day.” The pair grew close, accompanying their older siblings when they toured together and later attending the same LA school. “We were in the same strange position growing up in a really lonely environment surrounded by adults,” Jonas explains. “Our playgrounds were the rafters underneath MSG.”  

Besides small appearances on Hannah Montana, Cyrus’ biggest childhood gig was voicing Ponyo in the English dub of the 2008 Hayao Miyazaki anime. (Coincidentally, Jonas was her co-lead; they recently got matching tattoos of their characters after recording Jonas’ track “High and Sad.”) But Cyrus was still close enough to the spotlight to be singed as paparazzi camped outside the family home and people criticized her pubescent body online. She struggled to define her own identity in the shadow of her family, exacerbating her body dysmorphia and depression. Meanwhile, rocky patches in her parents’ marriage played out in the tabloids. (They divorced in 2022.) “It’s no secret that they went through things when I was younger,” Cyrus says. “It was very much out there, and it was hard for me.” 

While music was in her DNA — her grandfather sang in a gospel quartet — Cyrus spent childhood largely content to ride horses in Calabasas. She started writing songs at 14 after discovering the English singer-songwriter Ben Howard; Music turned out to be a natural vehicle for processing her adolescent experiences.

In 2016, Cyrus launched into the Hot 100 with her debut single, “Make Me (Cry),” a collaboration with the British singer Labrinth that has remained a staple of barre class playlists. She continued to release emo-pop tracks over the next few years, and she dropped her first EP, Good Cry, in 2018. Led by her multi-platinum single “July,” Cyrus’ followup, 2020’s The End of Everything, pointed to a more rootsy direction. 

Later that year, around the same time she received a Grammy nomination for Best New Artist, Cyrus was consumed by a Xanax addiction that isolated her from her loved ones and caused her to pass out in the middle of a television interview. She channeled her recovery into her 2022 debut, The Hardest Part. Produced by Mike Crossey (the Arctic Monkeys, The 1975), the album returned Cyrus to her country-pop roots and features deeply personal songs about toxic relationships, substance abuse, and anticipatory grief. 

I Want My Loved Ones To Go With Me sees Cyrus reunite with Crossey and Australian songwriter PJ Harding, a close collaborator since “July.” All three share production credits — a first for Cyrus. Her songwriting, which touches on themes of death, regret, and romance, reveals a deep soul. “What’s It All For” ponders the existentialism of the titular question, asking “Why have a family/If that ain’t what you want?/Why have a child/You don’t know how to love?” Meanwhile, on “Way of the World,” an easygoing duet with Ella Langley, she accepts pain and loss as constants because eternal peace awaits in the afterlife. But then, a moment of nervous uncertainty slips in: “God, I hope that's the way that it works.” 

Jonas credits this quality in part to the maturity required of a young person adjacent to Hollywood. “Growing up around that industry, you have to be hyper aware of your environment,” he says. “For her, I’ve seen that translate into this radical empathy.” 

The album showcases Cyrus’ musical lineage, from “With You,” the first song her father ever wrote, to “Apple Tree,” which features Cyrus’ paternal grandfather reciting a hymn written by his own father, Cyrus’ namesake. Her older brother, Braison, wrote “Don’t Put It All on Me” for his little sister about how she took on the burdens of her loved ones while struggling with her own mental health. (She was eventually diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder.) Touched, Cyrus repaid the gesture by inviting Robin Pecknold of Fleet Foxes to sing on the track. “My brother used to drive me to horseback riding practice until he moved back to Nashville when I turned 16,” Cyrus says. “Every single day, we would listen to Fleet Foxes and harmonize in the car.”

Another longtime favorite indie songwriter who appears on the album is Bill Callahan, who co-wrote and sings on the closer “XXX.” Back in 2024, producer and XL Recordings owner Richard Russell asked Callahan who he would most like to write a song for. He named Cyrus, and the result was “Porcupine Tattoo,” released as part of Russell’s project Everything is Recorded. “I was like, Bill Callahan knows I’m on the earth?” Cyrus says, recalling her shock. “When we met in the studio to record ‘XXX,’ I had to look at him and be like, ‘Bill, are you telling me you get in your car and ask your phone to play Noah Cyrus?’” 

Since then, the pair have banked a number of songs together. And last year, after Callahan joined Cyrus onstage in Austin, she got his handwriting tattooed on her arm. “My relationship with Bill is very special and unexpected,” she says. “We’ve talked about wanting to do a side project, maybe an album or an EP.” 

For now though, it’s on to a series of festival dates, and then back to Los Angeles, where she lives with her fiancé, Pinkus, a German fashion designer. “My home life is rather simple: I’m in sweatpants, hanging with my dogs, playing Legend of Zelda,” Cyrus says. An avid horsegirl, she’s also likely to be found at the stable where her longtime coaches, whom she considered grandfather figures, provided a sense of normalcy throughout her youth. 

Cyrus gets emotional talking about horses. “When I close my eyes and think of heaven, I see my horse running to me,” she says, referring to her late gelding, Constantine, who is honored on the cover of I Want My Loved Ones To Go With Me. Cyrus recently teamed up with the ASPCA for Adopt a Horse Month and fell in love with a young mare named Fleur. Cyrus starts tearing up as she explains how Fleur died right before this run of tour dates, in the middle of the adoption process. She gestures to her arm, beneath her jacket, a Blondita x PETA collaboration: “I got a little tattoo of the flower that grows in her pasture.” 

“She was like me; she had this anxiety. I would put my hand on her rib cage and line up our breathing,” Cyrus says. “I remember her lowering her head and closing her eyes, and we both were calm.”