Pedigree is core to Miley Cyrus and her lore. Her father, Billy Ray, had the kind of crossover line-dancing hit in the ’90s whose success has scarcely been repeated. Equally crucial to Miley’s country-pop and boundary breaking is having Dolly Parton as a godmother. Billy Ray’s pride and persistence along with Parton’s business acumen and convention bending are dueling inspirations, but they’re also benchmarks of expectation for a successor. It’s all apparent in Miley’s ceaseless quest for a timeless tune. With 2023’s “Flowers,” a retro disco-pop gem making Minute Maid from the lemons of her divorce from Liam Hemsworth, Miley moved into a stratosphere of acclaim that has long enticed her. The song topped international charts and broke a decade of Grammy apathy for her with wins for Record of the Year and Best Solo Pop Performance. Belting the song out at a recent intimate Chateau Marmont performance, Miley radiated satisfaction at finally having found her standard, a song she wouldn’t mind singing to audiences for the rest of her life.
But, Beyoncé duet notwithstanding, the two years after Miley’s chart smash did not go the way they tend to go: an A-lister boosting their brand. Unexpected fights in court and in the field of public opinion slowly took up oxygen. Miley’s parents have each had public, messy romances that continue to fuel tabloid chatter about a full Cyrus family schism; she recently had to clarify she’s not estranged from her father. Meanwhile, Miley is being sued for allegedly copying too much of “Flowers” from Bruno Mars’s “When I Was Your Man” — a lawsuit she has struggled to dismiss. She also now says she’s unable to tour due to a vocal-cord disorder. So as she releases her ninth album, Something Beautiful, she aims to pitch more hits into the pantheon of great American songs. She’s also working out a resolution for fans who have hungered for a follow-up to the genre-melting 2021 Attention Tour and are instead getting a film she’s calling a “pop opera.” As always, the plan takes cues from her predecessors.
“More to Lose,” a breakup ballad conjuring a Faith Hill–Céline Dion wail-off at a ’90s VH1 Divas show, was birthed when Miley played the scorching, bluesy title track for Parton over Christmas break and Parton asked whether the album would have any hits. Miley made up titles on the spot and later hustled to attach songs strong enough to bolster her claim. “Lose” and much of the rest of the album labors toward universality and immortality by tiptoeing over time-tested sounds and concepts. It banks on the singer’s exquisite vocal tone — one she has worried she’ll lose if she undergoes surgery for a large polyp on her cords — and interdisciplinary curation fostering a balanced collection of songs. The Bob Mackie–gown borrower and friend of the Flaming Lips has a singular taste she has been unspooling ever since 2007’s Meet Miley Cyrus. Like her Disney Channel duo of Hannah Montana and Miley Stewart, Cyrus bandies from album to album between recklessness and reserve. Something Beautiful reasons that the audience that showed up for teenybop, country, trap-pop, and rock incarnations can sit with a show of varied talents in the mold of resilient singer-songwriter opuses of the 20th century. She wants to be seen as an auteur now.
But Beautiful offsets its delightful oddities with jibing pop traditionalism. “Lose” and the soulful alt-country groove of “Easy Lover” are chased by noirish drum-and-bass interludes that crash into jarringly sedate adjacent songs. The sense that things could get really weird is ever present and most delicious in the title track, a smoldering, intimate missive that explodes into a stunning rock coda on the insinuation that to fall in love is to literally, viscerally lose a sense of self: “Eat my heart / Break my soul / Take my parts.” Later, the six-minute scorcher “Walk of Fame” features head Alabama Shake Brittany Howard alternating between serene high notes and a vinegary rock howl with Cyrus playing chipper, clean counterpoint over production that barrels through disco, synth pop, and French house. Miley admires the Shakes enough to have invited their Sound & Color engineer, Shawn Everett, to join Something Beautiful’s production crew (also present: Cyrus’s punk-rock significant other, Maxx Morando; pop penman Michael Pollack; and members of indie-rock acts Foxygen and Alvvays).
Click here to preview your posts with PRO themes ››
While it furtively seeks collaborators and flashes influences from outside the pop veil, the album is just as often trying not to stick out. Controlled dalliance with unruliness is the game. Something Beautiful’s songs take time to close the deal, eroding reservations about overfamiliarity. Drippy deep cut “Pretend You’re God” imagines Stevie Nicks showing up at the studio where Sarah McLachlan made “Possession,” with hearty and haunting rock vocals dissolving into the beefy bass and stiff drum swing of early ’90s rock and pop acts trying hip-hop and electronica. But deeper in, percussion livens up under orgiastic shrieks and a cameo on guitar from Adam Granduciel of the War on Drugs. Miley thrives on subtler contrasts in her California-sober 30s with no Disney cage to break free from. Having grown up fully in the public eye with formidable heels to fill, she sees herself as a longtime acquaintance her fans simply grew up with and writes from a position of hard-love consultant.
But the faith that you’ll follow Cyrus through homages to Daft Punk, Fleetwood Mac, ABBA, ballroom culture, and more comes at the cost of lyricism frequently drenched in cliché. “We’re toe-to-toe, but I’m hanging on the wire,” she sings in “More to Lose,” later announcing that tears are “streaming like our favorite show tonight” and that memories fade like — you guessed it — denim jeans. This imagery has been done to death across the country and pop histories in which Cyrus is literate. More intriguing are threads begging to be teased out about death, rebirth, and artifice. The very Lady Gaga–sounding “Every Girl You’ve Ever Loved,” which includes a poem read by Naomi Campbell, taps on themes of perfection as performance; love songs frame co-habitation as an act of relinquishing power, not just a storybook resolution. But tracks like “Golden Burning Sun” manage this by way of barely artful directness: “Can I have you / If I never let you down? / Surrender.”
Meeting her audience at a remedial ground level in the lyrics while waxing ecstatically in interviews about the ambitions of Pink Floyd rock operas, Panos Cosmatos films, and Beyoncé documentaries relays a humming dissonance. What would happen if Miley gave in to the coarseness Something Beautiful periodically splashes in? Instead, she follows the windfall of “Flowers” with a further exploration of its sensibilities, searching for the melody and couplet so broad and immediate that you’re left in awe (or suspicion) that this is the first time you’re hearing it.
Sign up for The Critics
A weekly dispatch on the cultural discourse, for subscribers only.
