The Unknowable Miley Cyrus
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.”
