The Unknowable Miley Cyrus
These days, pop stars are required to participate in a relentless cycle of self-annihilation and triumphant rebirth—with each album, a new Era!—but there’s something almost uncanny about the plasticity of Miley Cyrus. After entering the public consciousness, in 2006, as the chipper, apple-cheeked star of the Disney Channel series “Hannah Montana,” she released multiple songs declaring herself a hedonist, beginning with “Can’t Be Tamed,” in 2010, and reaching a nihilistic apotheosis with her fourth album, “Bangerz,” from 2013. The single “We Can’t Stop” is an unrepentant ode to ripping it up: “So la-da-di-da-di, we like to party / Dancing with Molly / Doing whatever we want,” she announces in the pre-chorus. To some degree, Cyrus’s rebellion was preordained: in 2008, when she was fifteen, Annie Leibovitz photographed her nude, wrapped only in a bedsheet, for the cover of Vanity Fair. “You can’t say no to Annie!” Cyrus cheerfully told a reporter.
The Cyrus of “Bangerz” was plucky and impulsive, prone to twerking and sticking her tongue out. When she performed “We Can’t Stop” at the 2013 V.M.A.s, it was a brash rebuttal of her wholesome younger self. It was also a bonanza of what we might now call millennial cringe. Cyrus, who emerged onstage from inside a Teddy bear, ripped off a sparkly bodice to reveal a flesh-colored bikini. She got a little flirty with a foam finger. Robin Thicke strolled out, wearing Beetlejuice stripes, and did a verse from “Blurred Lines.” At one point, the camera cut to Drake, looking forlorn, and later to Rihanna, seated and largely expressionless. Yet “Bangerz,” which features around thirty songwriters, and production from Pharrell Williams, Dr. Luke, and Mike WiLL Made-It, remains Cyrus’s top-selling album; it débuted at No. 1 and eventually sold more than three million copies.
Cyrus has a big, blowsy voice with an unmistakable country warble. Her Southernness—she was born in Franklin, Tennessee, the second daughter of the country singer Billy Ray Cyrus, and a goddaughter of Dolly Parton—is more palpable on her early singles, such as “Party in the U.S.A.,” a pop masterpiece from 2009. Cyrus is always more compelling when she revels in her singularity and occasional awkwardness: “My tummy’s turnin’ and I’m feelin’ kinda homesick / Too much pressure and I’m nervous,” she sings in the pre-chorus. (Who among us?) “Party in the U.S.A.” is exquisitely performed, alternately shouty and tender—even now, it’s hard to think of another singer who could have so perfectly embodied its mix of innocence and hunger.
But since “Bangerz,” Cyrus has either been casting about for an identity that feels true, or embracing a postmodern disavowal of authenticity itself, depending on whom you ask. My money is on the earnest searching, though I do think that Cyrus enjoys, and excels at, character work, and has an unusual knack for inhabiting different styles. (The covers that she has done over the years, including Blondie’s “Heart of Glass” and the Cranberries’ “Zombie,” are reliably excellent.) Her penchant for reinvention feels less commercially motivated and more personal, as if she’s still trying to figure out who she really is—a process that many assume will wrap up by the close of one’s twenties (Cyrus is thirty-three) but which, in actuality, often goes on indefinitely. She followed up “Bangerz” with “Miley Cyrus & Her Dead Petz,” a freaky, strung-out psych-pop record that she released for free on SoundCloud. Much of the album was co-written and produced by Wayne Coyne, of the Flaming Lips, and it features tracks with blessedly stoned titles such as “Fucking Fucked Up” and “Milky Milky Milk.”
By 2017, Cyrus was covering her tattoos with makeup, wearing all white, and singing ballads of marital devotion. The video for “Malibu,” a single from the album “Younger Now,” shows Cyrus, then engaged to the actor Liam Hemsworth (they were married for eight months, between 2018 and 2019), on the beach, twirling in Pollyannaish ecstasy, her hair tousled by the sea breeze. She marvels at the ocean: “I never went boatin’, don’t get how they’re floatin’,” she sings, her voice full and trembly, “And sometimes I get so scared of what I can’t understand.” She released three more albums between 2020 and 2025, experimenting with indie rock and glam rock; on the single “Flowers,” the best-selling song of 2023, her sound is, by turns, folksy, retro, and disco-pop. “I can buy myself flowers,” she proclaims, “Write my name in the sand / Talk to myself for hours / Say things you don’t understand.”
I loved the confidence and ease of “Flowers”—it has the enticing swagger of Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive” and Fleetwood Mac’s “Go Your Own Way,” two iconic breakup tracks. I don’t think Cyrus has ever really made an awful record. Still, received together, her albums suggest that, aesthetically, she’s something of a blank canvas. This both points toward an enviable, large-minded freedom and leaves me wondering what she actually wants to say.
Three years ago, Cyrus released “Used to Be Young,” a plaintive ballad about saying sayonara to one’s wild years. It was a bonus track on a digital reissue of “Endless Summer Vacation,” her eighth LP. The song functions as a teary-eyed encomium for a misspent youth: “You tell me time has done changed me / That’s fine, I’ve had a good run.” Cyrus was thirty when the song was released—not ancient, exactly, but not a kid, either.
Still, perhaps it was too early to light the funeral pyre. Last month, she dropped her last name (she is now known, mononymously, as Miley); on Friday, she released her tenth album, “Bass Persuades.” The title track is dark, pulsing dance pop, indebted, in obvious ways, to the trickle-down influence of Madonna, particularly via Britney Spears, Lady Gaga, and Dua Lipa. Lyrically, the song is an homage to touching grass: “Glued your eyes to the telephone screen / But you missed the hit without MTV / Go analog, make it cinema,” Miley implores. The chorus is a kind of lashing: “The kids don’t wanna dance,” she sings, over and over. Spiritually, it feels like a companion piece to Spears’s (perfect) 2003 single “Me Against the Music,” about being so moved by the beat that you have no choice but to throw ass: “I’m the only one dancin’ up in this place,” Spears sang.
Yet whereas Spears is preternaturally gifted at this sort of punchy, staccato delivery—she brings a cheerleader’s precision to her vocals, even when she is mysteriously extending the word “on” to multiple syllables—Miley’s cyclone of a voice tends to work better with looser, airier material. Dance pop favors rigor over style; each note should hit like a fist. The cadence of the title track’s spoken verses reminds me a little bit of Charli XCX’s “Wink Wink” and Kesha’s “Tik Tok,” but Miley is a belter at heart; ultimately, I found myself longing for the big-breath bombast of tunes like “Wrecking Ball” and “The Climb.”
The rest of “Bass Persuades” contains similarly sultry, twilit songs about the sort of rhapsodic, all-consuming love that makes a person go googly-eyed: “I’ve got my own God / My God’s a hot boy,” she sings on “Different Religion.” Miley is engaged to the musician Maxx Morando, who appears in the black-and-white music video for “Let’s Get Married,” one of the album’s best tracks. (In the video, the couple prance around the Chateau Marmont, partying, wearing almost nothing—and who can blame them, for they are hot.) It’s a romantic song about being so overcome by desire that you can’t wait to seal the deal: “Then he said, ‘Baby, what did I do to desеrve you? / Tell me, what did I do to dеserve you? / Let’s go get married tonight.” On “Orbit,” a yearning, piano-led hymn that recalls the moodiness and desperation of Lana Del Rey, with a hint of Heart’s “Alone,” Miley sings, “And I would bend all space and time / To fall into your hands / I’m drawn to you / I belong to you.”
“Bass Persuades” is a mix of adoring ballads and throbbing dance songs, which is not an inaccurate representation of the experience of falling for somebody—the eternal pendulum swing between lust and devotion, wantonness and hope. Yet, with the exception of “Let’s Get Married,” there isn’t a single track here that really makes me think: Miley. Perhaps expecting fixed self-definition from a pop star is outdated, now that our attention is irreparably fractured. Miley has always engaged with questions of persona—“Hannah Montana” is about a pop star masquerading as a regular girl, or maybe vice versa—while professing authenticity. For her, those ideas aren’t mutually exclusive. In a recent interview, she spoke about the distance between who she is onstage and who she is at her pet-filled home in L.A.: “Sometimes I call what I do drag, because the way that I present myself is just someone that is so different from the person that feeds the tortoise every morning.” She has been a professional actor, after all, for more than two decades now.
The album reminds me, in a circuitous way, of Madonna’s guest verse in “Me Against the Music”: “Sexy lady, I’d rather see you bare your soul.” It’s a quick, almost maternal rejoinder to Spears’s obsession with being seen and admired on the dance floor. “Bass Persuades” does not want for confessionalism, or vulnerability, but there is something of a personality void at its center. I would also like to see more of Miley’s soul, lest she lose track of it entirely. ♦