Noah Cyrus opened up in a new profile on Tuesday (July 5) about her addiction to Xanax and how she turned her struggle into music.
“My boyfriend at the time, when I was 18, was the first person that gave me a Xanax, and it became a way for us to bond,” the singer said in a wide-ranging profile with Rolling Stone. “I think I wanted to fit in with him. I wanted to be what he wanted and what he thought was cool and what I thought everybody was doing … Once I felt that it was possible to silence things out for a second and numb your pain, it was over.”
Now 22, she’s been in recovery since the latter part of 2020, and recognizes that a major part of her addiction was fueled by being “surrounded by people who were easily able to get it by buying it from people … It just kind of becomes this dark pit, bottomless pit.”
By the release of her second EP, 2020’s The End of Everything, Cyrus started to hit rock bottom, nodding off in the middle of an international TV interview to promote the project and being what she terms “emotionally … not there” during her maternal grandmother’s death a few months later.
The artist didn’t go into detail about her recovery, but noted that she received aid from those she needed it from. “I was being helped by everybody that I needed help from,” she shared, “and it took some time to get on my own two feet.”
The youngest Cyrus sibling also credits her upcoming album The Hardest Part with helping her through her recovery process. “It was coming out in my lyrics,” she said of channeling her experience with addiction into her music. “So, it’s like, ‘I’m not going to hide my truth.’ I think it was evident that I was going through something the past couple years — I think my fans saw it. I think the public could see it.”
The Hardest Part is slated for release Sept. 16 via Columbia Records. Cyrus also teased the album in a conversation with Billboard about pre-release single “Ready to Go.“
