Doja Cat Says She’s Considering Three Years Away From Music: ‘I Want to Just Do Whatever’

Doja Cat says she may step away from music for a while, floating the idea of taking “three years off” after a run that has already produced five studio albums and a stack of Billboard Hot 100 hits. In a cover story for Elle UK published Wednesday, May 13, she suggested that the next stretch of her life might look a lot less like release cycles and touring schedules, and a lot more like her other interests.

“I demand time from my team,” she said, making clear that the pauses are not an afterthought but something she actively carves out. “They’ve helped me to find pockets between the really busy moments.” For Doja, those pockets are where painting lives, along with the other projects that tend to get squeezed around the demands of pop stardom. “I think I want to take three years off,” she continued. “I want to just do whatever.”

At the moment, that “whatever” includes working on another mural and finally finishing the upper level of her house. She noted that the space has remained empty for years, saying there’s “been nothing in here for four years or five.” It is a telling detail. After years of operating in overdrive, her idea of downtime sounds less like retreat and more like reclaiming unfinished corners of her life.

The timing matters, too. Doja last released an album in 2025 with Vie, which reached No. 4 on the Billboard 200, and she is still on the road behind it. Her Tour Ma Vie World Tour began in November and is set to run through the beginning of December, with a monthlong break now giving way to a return to touring in Kigali, Rwanda. Even with a pause on the horizon, she is still in the middle of the album cycle that prompted it.

Elsewhere in the interview, Doja reflected on a quality that has helped define her writing for years: humor. She pointed to artists including Nicki Minaj, Drake, Jay-Z, Kendrick Lamar and Lil Wayne, arguing that they are not comedians, but could be. “They could write a stand-up set if they wanted to, but music is much more fun …” she said, adding that she picked up the idea from Jay-Z after watching an interview in which he discussed irony as something essential to hip-hop and rap.

She also addressed the borderline personality disorder diagnosis she first shared with fans in March, and how it shapes her relationships. “If I have a boyfriend, and he leaves just to run errands, my brain thinks he’s breaking up with me,” she told Elle. She tied that reaction to her father leaving when she was young, saying, “I have to scrape against it and teach myself that that’s not happening to me. I’m safe.”

See Doja on the cover of Elle and photos from the shoot below.