When Miley Cyrus won her first Grammy Award – for Best Pop Solo Performance for her runaway 2023 hit “Flowers” – it was the waving of a chequered flag. “I’m gonna make some of my weird s***,” she decided.
Remember, this is the artist who followed her biggest-selling album, Bangerz, in 2015 with the 23-track Miley Cyrus and her Dead Petz, featuring immortal songs such as “F***ing F***ed Up”, “Milky Milky Milk” and “I’m So Drunk”. She also collaborated with the Flaming Lips, joked about being stoned and recorded herself playing Tibetan singing bowls (“Miley Tibetan Bowlzzz”). Could it really get weirder?
Well, she’s done it. Her ninth studio album, Something Beautiful, was apparently inspired by Alan Parker’s 1982 surrealist drama film The Wall, influenced in turn by the Pink Floyd album of the same name. Cyrus watched it as a teenager with some friends; they rented a limo, smoked weed and wore Seventies-style fur coats. “We really leaned in,” she told Harper’s Bazaar in a recent interview. “My idea was making The Wall but with a better wardrobe.”
That might sound vapid, and Cyrus’s wardrobe for the accompanying Something Beautiful film is certainly eye-popping, but the album itself isn’t the disaster such a throwaway comment implies. Having experienced a level of fame that could easily drive a person to erect a wall around themselves, the teenage Cyrus must have related to Bob Geldof’s depressed rock star character, whose coping mechanisms spectacularly backfire.
Her voice channels that pain more than the lyrics. The ballad “More to Lose” demonstrates her extraordinary emotional heft (ignore the noodling Eighties brass, it lends nothing). “Easy Lover” steers away from the hard-to-beat bombast of Phil Collins and Philip Bailey’s 1984 classic, instead opting for swooning, sizzling disco of the Abba variety. Heavyweights lend their own talents: Pino Palladino carves out those swampy bass grooves, Sara Watkins of Nickel Creek fame is behind that piercing fiddle motif. Brittany Howard, who contributes electric guitar to “Easy Lover”, later offers her own extraordinary voice to the dizzying dancefloor strut of “Walk of Fame”.
Elsewhere, there’s a brilliantly bonkers cameo from Naomi Campbell on the euphoric “Every Girl You’ve Ever Loved” (“She has the perfect scent/ She speaks the perfect French”) in between self-congratulatory lyrics from Cyrus: “I match my bag to my new dress/ I’m still looking like a 10/ While my hair is a mess/ And I’m gonna work it all night/ ’Til I get what I want.” If there’s a solid gold banger on the album (singles “Something Beautiful” and “End of the World” aren’t on par with predecessors like “Flowers” or “Wrecking Ball”), it’s this one.
In her Harper’s Bazaar interview, Cyrus readily admitted that she is “very inconsistent”. In a way, though, her habit of veering so wildly off-piste is, in its own way, consistent. Something Beautiful isn’t quite as crazy or groundbreaking as she seems to think, but its spirit of adventure encapsulates what we’ve come to know and love about one of our most frustrating yet endearing pop stars.
