For more than a decade, Miley Cyrus has swung deliberately back and forth between maximalism and a relatively simple pop formula. For every Miley Cyrus & Her Dead Petz in her discography there’s a Bangerz. For every “Mother’s Daughter,” there’s a “Malibu.” And like clockwork, Cyrus’s ninth studio album, Something Beautiful, finds the singer squarely in the former mode, following up the more straightforward pop of 2023’s Endless Summer Vacation with a post-apocalyptic prog-pop visual album.
Unlike that of its predecessor, the music on Something Beautiful oozes as much personality as the singer herself. Following a psychedelic prelude in which Cyrus outlines her creative ethos—“The beauty one finds alone is a prayer that longs to be shared,” she says—the title track, an intermittently explosive prog-rock torch song, serves as a Big Bang of sorts, as Cyrus’s desire is expressed in short, ecstatic bursts of brass and electric guitar.
While only a single track on the radio-ready Endless Summer Vacation cracked the four-minute mark, the songs on Something Beautiful take their sweet time unfolding, luxuriating in sax solos, spoken interludes, and some loosely defined world-building. Upon first glance, the album’s lyrics largely evade specificity—something about ego death and the end of the world couched in rather standard-issue love tropes. “Show me how you’d hold me if tomorrow wasn’t comin’ for sure,” Cyrus wails on the euphoric “End of the World”—potential Armageddon scored to live strings, glockenspiel, and some big, ABBA-esque piano chords.
An intriguing ambivalence, though, begins to surface throughout: “You drive me crazy, but I still miss you when you’re gone,” Cyrus sings on “Easy Lover.” She asks, “Do you still love me?/I gotta know,” on the haunting “Pretend You’re God,” before adding, “Never mind, just keep it quiet if you don’t.” She likens herself to a pearl in her lover’s palm on “Something Beautiful,” and while an open palm is typically associated with trust, the formation of a pearl is a defense mechanism against something threatening. These contradictions bolster Cyrus’s vision of a culture she sees as sick and confused—one that she believes can only be remedied with love.
If the first half of Something Beautiful rides the ebb and flow of the intro’s cosmic microwave background, from the shimmery piano ballad “More to Love” to the bluesy “Easy Lover,” whose infectious hook begs you to sing along, the album’s back half is a bona fide barnburner. “Every Girl You’ve Ever Loved” is a feminist anthem that channels ballroom culture, complete with synth stabs out of 1985 and a spoken verse from Naomi Campbell, while “Reborn” is dirty, dark, and rapturous, with what sounds like Gregorian chants submerged under a deep, wobbly bassline and sweeping strings. It’s as if we’ve been dropped into a dystopian discotheque.
Elsewhere, the six-minute “Walk of Fame,” which features a blistering backing vocal from Alabama Shakes’s Brittany Howard, marries the operatic bluster of Lady Gaga’s Born This Way with the disco splendor of Donna Summer’s Bad Girls. The song conjures neon-tinged snapshots of a ’70s-era Sunset Strip so vivid that it’s hard to imagine that the musical film that accompanies Something Beautiful could ever live up to them.
On the album’s final track, “Give Me Love,” Cyrus surveys humanity’s path from paradise to hell, inspired by a copy of Hieronymus Bosch’s painting “Garden of Earthly Delights” that she found at a yard sale in the Valley. In the end, she bids farewell to her “perfect Eden,” perhaps resigned to the realization that love can’t save the world after all. Maybe, though, pop music can.
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