Noah Cyrus

Noah Cyrus: From Nashville Bloodline to Country-Folk on Her Own Terms

Noah Cyrus, the Nashville-born singer-songwriter and pop-to-folk crossover artist, has built a catalog that consistently outpaces its own expectations. Born January 8, 2000, into arguably American music’s most scrutinized family, Cyrus launched her recording career in 2016 with the Labrinth-featuring debut single “Make Me (Cry)” — a move that signaled a seriousness of purpose that the industry wasn’t fully prepared for. In the decade since, she has moved from polished commercial pop through introspective acoustic intimacy to an openly country-and-folk orientation, accumulating Grammy nominations, RIAA certifications, and critical goodwill along the way. Her second studio album, I Want My Loved Ones to Go with Me (2025), released via Records, LLC and Columbia Records, represents the fullest and most confident articulation of that arc to date.

Emergence, Bloodline, and a Sound That Had to Be Earned

Noah Lindsey Cyrus was born on January 8, 2000, in Nashville, Tennessee, to producer and director Tish Cyrus and country singer Billy Ray Cyrus.
To state the obvious: that surname carries enormous freight.
She is the younger sister of Miley Cyrus
, one of the most commercially dominant pop figures of the past two decades, and the weight of that comparison has shadowed — and also, at times, sharpened — every career decision Noah has made. The interesting thing, looking back at the full arc, is how deliberately she moved to define a sound that could not be confused with her sister’s.

As a child actress, she voiced the titular character in the English dub of the film Ponyo (2008), and appeared in minor roles on shows including Hannah Montana and Doc.
But the pivot to recording was sharp and intentional. In November 2016,
emerging at the age of 16, Noah Cyrus immediately captivated audiences with her unique blend of pop and soulful southern vocals.
Her debut single, “Make Me (Cry)” featuring UK singer-producer Labrinth, was not a teenager’s tentative first step — it was a minor-key pop ballad with genuine emotional architecture, built around a restrained vocal that understood the value of space and dynamics. The single’s RIAA Platinum certification confirmed that critical attention and commercial reach were, at least at the start, moving in the same direction.

The years between 2017 and 2019 produced a series of commercially effective singles — “Stay Together,” “Again” (featuring XXXTentacion) — that demonstrated an instinct for melodic construction without yet revealing a fully coherent artistic identity.
Building upon her family’s musical heritage, Noah Cyrus has an emotive sound that straddles contemporary pop and country,
and the tension between those two poles — between crafted accessibility and something more rooted and personal — is what gives her career narrative its genuine dramatic interest. The resolution of that tension, when it arrived, was worth waiting for.

They all follow in the footsteps of Noah’s great-grandfather, who wrote hymns, and her new album nods towards this musical legacy.
That lineage — church music, country soul, Nashville session tradition — runs deeper in her work than any single genre tag suggests, and understanding it is essential to understanding why her best recordings feel less like pop product and more like testimonials.

Discography Highlights: The Making of a Catalog

The inflection point in Noah Cyrus’s catalog came with The End of Everything (2020), an EP that arrived during a period of collective grief and found an audience ready for exactly its emotional register.
Her songwriting skills were truly showcased in The End of Everything EP, which yielded the triple-platinum “July” and RIAA-certified Gold release “Lonely.”
The EP reached No. 1 on the Billboard Heatseekers Albums chart —
peaking at No. 124 on the main US albums chart and earning RIAA Gold certification
— and it generated the Grammy nomination that confirmed she had moved beyond the inherited-fame conversation entirely.
It was her 2020 EP The End of Everything that set her apart, launching her onto the Billboard charts and earning her a Grammy nomination for Best New Artist.

In between earning a GRAMMY Award nod in the category of Best New Artist, she teamed up with PJ Harding for the People Don’t Change EP in 2021.
That collaboration — with Australian singer-songwriter PJ Harding, recorded under Records/RCA — pointed toward the acoustic, Americana-adjacent territory that would define her studio album debut. It also demonstrated a recurring pattern in her career: that she works best when the collaborator brings structural restraint that her natural warmth of delivery can work against and through.

The Hardest Part was released on September 16, 2022, in the genre of country-soul and acoustic pop, with a runtime of 33:46, on Records and Columbia,
produced by a team that included Mike Crossey and Benjamin Gibbard (of Death Cab for Cutie).
Her first full-length album, The Hardest Part, was released to widespread critical acclaim.
It charted at No. 13 on the US Heatseekers chart and peaked at No. 6 on the UK Americana/Folk Albums chart — modest in pure commercial terms, but the kind of positioning that indicates a dedicated, quality-conscious listener base rather than passive streaming traffic.

Her most recent work, I Want My Loved Ones to Go with Me (2025), is catalogued and available on Get Music.
Stylized in all caps, it is the sophomore studio album from Noah Cyrus, released on July 11, 2025, under Records, LLC and Columbia Records.

The album comprises 11 songs with a runtime of 42 minutes
, with a
deluxe edition expanding the project to 14 songs, released October 10, 2025.

Geographic Reception and the Audience She’s Built

Noah Cyrus’s core streaming and purchase geography reflects the natural distribution of Americana-adjacent pop: the United States first, with secondary depth in the UK, Australia, Canada, and Scandinavia — particularly Norway, where “Stay Together” charted at No. 5 and “Again” reached No. 6 on the singles chart. That Nordic resonance is characteristic of a particular emotional register in contemporary pop: melancholic, melodically direct, and lyrically unguarded in ways that Scandinavian audiences have consistently rewarded across artist generations.

The UK has remained a consistent market throughout her catalog cycle, with
The Hardest Part reaching No. 6 on the UK Americana chart and No. 10 on the UK Country chart.
The positioning there reflects the British appetite for American artists who operate in the southern indie-folk tradition — the same listener profile that has driven strong UK numbers for artists like Phoebe Bridgers, Hozier, and Brandi Carlile. Cyrus fits that cultural frame more comfortably than she fits the mainstream pop category that her early singles might have suggested.

The 2025 album cycle saw her mount a tour in direct support:
the I Want My Loved Ones to Go with Me Tour, comprising 28 shows, began September 12, 2025, in Santa Ana, California, and concluded October 24, 2025, in Phoenix, Arizona.
That routing — West Coast-heavy, with moderate venue sizing — is consistent with the organic growth of a fan base that follows an artist through stylistic evolution rather than chasing a single viral moment. The audience she has assembled is not large by festival-headline standards, but it is unusually loyal and unusually geographically spread for an artist at her catalog depth.

The album title I Want My Loved Ones to Go with Me draws on the belief, rooted in her upbringing in church, that loved ones will be reunited in heaven one day.
That spiritual referencing resonated with listeners in the American South and the broader Christian country audience, while its emotional universality — grief, attachment, the fear of loss — gave it traction in secular listening contexts as well. The dual-access quality of the album’s thematic core is part of what gives the project unusual geographic breadth for an indie-folk-adjacent record.

Critical Legacy: The Case for Taking Noah Cyrus Seriously

The critical conversation around Noah Cyrus has, from the beginning, been distorted by the gravitational pull of her family. It is worth spending a moment on the mechanics of that distortion: reviewers who approach her work through the lens of dynasty inevitably miss the ways in which her artistic development has been, in functional terms, far more linear and intentional than Miley’s. Where her sister’s career has been characterized by dramatic and often abrupt genre repositioning — each album a kind of public identity reset — Noah Cyrus has moved incrementally, drilling deeper into acoustic emotionalism with each release cycle rather than casting wide for a new audience.

She was nominated for Best New Artist at the 63rd Annual Grammy Awards,
a category that in 2021 included Doja Cat, Phoebe Bridgers, Kaytranada, and Ingrid Andress. The nomination placed her in company that clarified her artistic positioning more precisely than any genre label: she was being evaluated alongside artists who were, like her, making emotionally direct music that didn’t quite fit the dominant commercial format of the moment. That she didn’t win is less relevant than that she was there at all — particularly given that The End of Everything EP, the qualifying work, is under 30 minutes of music.

Her debut studio album, The Hardest Part (2022),
was met with widespread critical acclaim from music critics after its release,
with reviewers noting its restraint and emotional specificity. The production work from Mike Crossey and, notably, Death Cab for Cutie’s Benjamin Gibbard, gave the record a Pacific Northwest indie-folk warmth that sat unusually well alongside its Nashville emotional directness. The mixing of those two sensibilities — Southern disclosure and indie-rock structural economy — is the central craft achievement of that album, and critics who engaged with it on its own terms found it genuinely rewarding.

On her second album, I Want My Loved Ones to Go with Me, she immerses herself in anthemic folk music and alt-country, recruiting guests including Blake Shelton on the pedal-steel-heavy campfire duet “New Country” and Fleet Foxes’ Robin Pecknold on the swooning ballad “Don’t Put It All on Me.”

She also recruits cult indie-folk figure Bill Callahan for album closer “XXX” — and though Callahan has one of the most recognizable voices in music, Cyrus serves as a perfect foil, tracking his low register with a soaring, confident performance.
The critical consensus on that guest-list curation is significant: you don’t call Robin Pecknold and Bill Callahan for a pop record. Their presence signals an artistic seriousness that the broader indie press has been slowly acknowledging.

The GRAMMY Museum welcomed Cyrus for an evening celebrating I Want My Loved Ones to Go with Me, discussing her creative process, career, and performing live.
That institutional recognition — the GRAMMY Museum does not typically programme emerging artists without a credentialed critical standing — is one of the clearer signals that Cyrus has crossed the threshold from industry-adjacent celebrity into a genuinely artist-grade reputation. The work sustains that reading. What her catalog reveals, taken in full, is not a famous person making music, but a songwriter who has been using each release to solve a specific creative problem — and who, on her second studio album, seems to have found the form that most naturally accommodates what she has to say.

Frequently Asked Questions

Where should I start with Noah Cyrus’s catalog?

The most useful entry point depends on what you’re looking for. For emotional impact in a compact format, The End of Everything EP (2020) remains the defining statement of her earlier work — “July” in particular demonstrates her sense of melodic economy and tonal restraint. For the fullest version of her current artistic identity, I Want My Loved Ones to Go with Me (2025) is where she sounds most entirely herself. The debut single “Make Me (Cry)” (2016) is still a strong cold open for listeners who want to trace the full arc from the beginning.

Is Noah Cyrus still active?

Yes. Her I Want My Loved Ones to Go with Me Tour, comprising 28 shows, ran from September 12 to October 24, 2025,
and the deluxe edition of the album followed in October 2025 with additional tracks including “If There’s A Heaven” (with Stephen Wilson Jr.) and a “Way of the World” demo. She remains signed to Records, LLC and Columbia Records and is actively touring and releasing music.

Who has Noah Cyrus collaborated with?

Her second album includes guest appearances from Fleet Foxes, Ella Langley, Blake Shelton, and Bill Callahan.
Across her broader catalog, notable collaborations include
Jimmie Allen on “This Is Us,” which received RIAA Gold certification
, a joint EP with Australian singer-songwriter PJ Harding, and a duet with her sister Miley Cyrus on “I Got So High That I Saw Jesus.” Her debut single featured UK producer Labrinth, and she has also appeared on a track with Shaboozey and Demi Lovato.

Which artists are similar to Noah Cyrus?

Listeners drawn to Cyrus’s particular blend of country-soul intimacy and indie-folk restraint tend to find resonance in the work of Phoebe Bridgers, Maggie Rogers, Hozier, Orville Peck (who appears on the I Want My Loved Ones to Go with Me deluxe edition), and Brandi Carlile. For the Nashville-rooted emotional directness, Kacey Musgraves and Ingrid Andress occupy similar listener geography. You can explore more artists in this lineage via the Noah Cyrus artist page on Get Music.