Miley Cyrus’ pop-stardom is confounding. She is undoubtedly one of the greatest living performers—one of the few Disney stars to break away from their child acting origins and carve out a meaningful career in adulthood. You could—and should—argue that Cyrus is the best of that crop, usurping Hilary Duff’s reign when Hannah Montana ended in 2011 and the Bangerz era began two years later. But, on a macro level, Miley’s discography has been pitifully underwhelming since 2013. The success of “We Can’t Stop” and “Wrecking Ball,” attached to a then-recent signing with RCA, helped her abandon the Disney vortex for good, but the LPs released after—the Flaming Lips-assisted Miley Cyrus & Her Dead Petz, Younger Now, Plastic Hearts, and Endless Summer Vacation—made for a genre-agnostic sequence with little triumph.
The mainstream pop safety of her Columbia debut Endless Summer Vacation two years ago, despite spawning the Grammy-winning mega-hit “Flowers,” was barbarically bland. It paired Cyrus with in-demand producers like Kid Harpoon and Tyler Johnson (Harry Styles) and Greg Kurstin (Adele), while also reuniting her with Mike Will Made It, but it never reached the same kind of climax found in “Midnight Sky,” her best post-Disney single. And Cyrus’ cover of Blondie’s “Heart of Glass,” famously performed at the iHeart Festival during COVID, proved that most of her previous, post-Disney ideas were sorely undercutting her greatest asset: her voice.
And that voice has only gotten better with time. She revealed last week that she has Reinke’s edema, an “abuse of the vocal cords” that has lent a hand in the timbre of her singing. The disorder is rare, yet it’s also the “ultimate vocal fry,” resulting from a polyp growth on Cyrus’ vocal cord that gives her delivery a deepened texture. She was supposed to have it removed in 2019, but passed on a follow-up operation. That grit and rasp comes in undeniably during “Heart of Glass,” and it’s what makes her ninth album, Something Beautiful, the best thing she’s ever made.
Something Beautiful could have coasted on the commercial and industry successes of Endless Summer Vacation. “Flowers” was a #1 hit for eight non-consecutive weeks and won Record of the Year, after all. Wherever Cyrus wanted to go next would certainly be a blank-check endeavor. Her first decision was to assemble a “band,” leaning on the collaborative momentum sparked by her work on Beyoncé’s “II MOST WANTED” in 2024. Leading the charge is Foxygen’s Jonathan Rado and Cyrus’ old pal, the Grammy-nominated Shawn Everett—whose work with Alabama Shakes, Perfume Genius, the War on Drugs, and Kacey Musgraves definitively changed rock music’s algorithm in the 2010s. The rest of the Something Beautiful roster is unprecedentedly deep, featuring Cyrus’ romantic partner and punk drummer Maxx Morando, Alvvays’ Molly Rankin and Alec O’Hanley, Landlady’s Adam Schatz, Tobias Jesso Jr., Kenny Segal, Pino Palladino, the Lemon Twigs’ Brian D’Addario, Model/Actriz’s Cole Haden, Danielle Haim, Flea, Andrew Wyatt, Nick Hakim, and Bibi Bourelly.
In “Prelude,” which Cyrus co-wrote with Haden, she conducts a spoken-word monologue to the backing of synths and strings. The soundscape builds up into prettiness, though there’s an element of metallic horror clanging beneath the sweetness. Cyrus recites the literary just as Haden did on his Model/Actriz song “Headlights,” following the same moody, breathy cadence: “Aching to be seen, aching to become real, but the beauty one finds alone is a prayer that longs to be shared.” Considering that Cyrus has made her bed in country, rock, pop, and R&B, her turn towards a harsher, operatic sound in “Something Beautiful” feels properly in her wheelhouse of reinvention. She coils herself around the microphone like Amy Winehouse, only for the melody to erupt into an massive, angular blast of distortion and thrashing sax. Her croon warps into total drama, like Beth Gibbons crashing out on an old Portishead joint, before her pop prowess puts on Trent Reznor’s clothes.
Considering how unpredictable Cyrus is—think: the very good Bangerz turning into the very bad, psychedelic follow-up, Miley Cyrus & Her Dead Petz—she’s proved incapable of staying in one genre lane for longer than an album cycle. But on Something Beautiful, she’s changing her tone on every track. “End of the World,” which features harmonies from Rankin and guitar/piano from O’Hanley, is a horny, dream-pop sequel to the fame-chasing “Party in the U.S.A.,” as Cyrus cries of romance in Malibu and a spontaneous trip to Paris, singing against a medley of feel-good, bubblegum electronics and disco guitar. The lyrics aren’t too sharp (“Let’s spend the dollars you’ve been saving on a Mercedes Benz and throw a party like McCartney with some help from our friends” is lopsidedly cheesy), but Cyrus’ knack for a good hook remains robust.
Her mainstream habits kick in on “Golden Burning Sun,” the sugary, emphatic pop romp that doesn’t linger in experimentalism but rushes in potent doses of surrendered lyricism (“I know we’re young, but it doesn’t last”) and the safety of Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ guitarist Nick Zinner’s predictably lush phrases. “More to Lose” is the greatest song Cyrus has ever worked on, putting her God-given mezzo-soprano to good work. Rado plays, by my count 10 instruments here, and Nelson Devereaux’s saxophone solo perfectly underscores Cyrus’ singing—which is as epic and heavy-hearted as ever. The way she grips the “but I wish it wasn’t true” line, screaming it with dramatic abandon, will give you chills. The four pre-release singles span the depths of jazz, psych-pop, industrial rock, and R&B, yet “More to Lose” and its conventional balladry remains the tallest height marked on the doorframe.
“Interlude 1” is crunchy and disjointed, as if a jazz band is playing in the next room until, suddenly, Henry Solomon’s saxophones and clarinet tremble in the foreground and a 22-piece string ensemble (featuring 12 violinists) helps the track fade out like a Pet Sounds instrumental. “Interlude 2” is clubby and chirpy, climbing upwards into techno bombast with those ever-present orchestra players swirling beneath the action-movie soundscape. Woven in-between the tangents is the soul-stirring, country-tinged, Younger Now-citing “Easy Lover,” the new best example of Miley Cyrus’ signature style: sticky singing gleaned from an even stickier bedrock of orchestral funk that lands her closer to Dusty Springfield than Britney Spears. And, if the guitar playing sounds familiar to you, that’s because it’s Alabama Shakes’ Brittany Howard on the axe, a role she takes later on the Plastic Hearts-style, disco-rock charm of “Walk of Fame”—a dance song culled from the surge of “Interlude 2” and splattered with a “ooh-ooh” backup vocal that’s already become a thorny earworm.
The greatest Miley era that never was—the pop flourishes from her 2019 EP SHE IS COMING—returns in “Every Girl You’ve Ever Loved” and “Reborn,” the latter evoking the “Prelude” cadence before tumbling into a strident house groove. The melodramatic “Reborn” chorus—“If Heaven exists, I’ve been there before / Kill my ego, let’s be reborn”—calls to mind Lady Gaga’s mechanistic theater-pop, and the formation-building rhythms sound stadium-ready. “Every Girl You’ve Ever Loved” may not ever be a fan-favorite, but it cites one of Cyrus’ greatest heroes, Madonna—thanks to fashion model Naomi Campbell’s spoken-word “pose” passages. Even the percussive pangs of “Pretend You’re Good,” colored by lasering synth jabs and Adam Granduciel’s recognizable guitar playing, open up a pathway for Cyrus to shred her throat from pitching her singing up so high.
Something Beautiful ends in an oxymoron, in the quiet epicness of the heavenly baroque “Give Me Love.” It’s a miscellany of belching warbles, epic ambient stretches, synths pulsing and contrasting in separate octaves, vocal runs, and campy theremin ooze. The album isn’t innovative, but its big, sensual swings and disarming, unpredictable tacks make for Cyrus’ most kinetic splash of diva mentality yet. Finally, for the first time since Bangerz, Cyrus has moved her chameleonic talents out of the ordinary—embracing ad-libs, prog-rock eruptions, techno flair, and pop blowouts with abandon. Her eclecticism is no longer lost in the void of marketable tracklists and each song—accompanied by film visuals so she won’t have to go on tour— on Something Beautiful is a taste of everything she’s done well without overcooking any singular concept. How the charts will take to such a record so allergic to categorization remains to be seen, but Miley Cyrus at her very best was well worth the wait.
Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Northeast Ohio.
