With her smoldering alto, a roster of indie rock luminaries, and remarkable gusto, Miley Cyrus tucks into a concept album without a concept.
Have you been in a prominent but underappreciated indie rock band within the past 15 years? Does your musical expertise include Cristal Baschet, fiddle engineering, or “ambient sculpture?” Have you ever been favorably reviewed by this website? If you answered “yes” to one or more of these questions, you might be on Miley Cyrus’ new album.
Something Beautiful, Cyrus’ follow-up to her 2023 LP Endless Summer Vacation, features a credit roster that rivals the length of this review. It is a concept album without a concept: “My idea was making The Wall, but with a better wardrobe and more glamorous and filled with pop culture,” Cyrus told Harper’s Bazaar last fall. Executing that vision, however thin, required an army of indie rock vets: Foxygen’s Jonathan Rado, Alabama Shakes’ Brittany Howard, the War on Drugs’ Adam Granduciel, Nick Hakim, Alvvays’ Molly Rankin and Alec O’Hanley, Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ Nick Zinner, the Lemon Twigs’ Brian D’Addario, and Haim’s Danielle Haim, just to name a few. Cyrus executive-produced Something Beautiful with Shawn Everett, who also plays a number of instruments on the 13-track album—a tonally confused entry in Cyrus’ catalog that lurches between hi-fidelity art rock and soggy, warmed-over pop. Directionless and thematically vague, it starts with a bang and ends in a whimper.
Cyrus released “Prelude” and “Something Beautiful” as the album’s lead singles, a choice as misleading as making them the opening tracks. They are Something Beautiful’s best songs, and the only pieces that audibly justify Cyrus’ sprawling team of collaborators. Though their initial presentation was laughably “high concept” (in both music videos Cyrus preens about in archival couture), the songs themselves contain the most interesting arrangement and production Cyrus has ever recorded to. “Prelude,” co-written by Cole Haden of New York experimental group Model/Actriz, is part Tangerine Dream sci-fi score, part spaghetti Western overture, recorded with a dizzying amount of equipment: Moog, Fairlight CMI, saxophone, violin, Barr-Fox Wurlitzer Theater Organ, cello, viola, Minimoog. Cyrus does her best Laurie Anderson impression atop the layered arpeggios; spooling out stoic but evocative spoken word, her voice is slightly mottled, as if coated in fine ash. It almost works, except for the clumsy, inflated language (“Like when following an image from a train/Your eyes can’t keep the passing landscapes from being swallowed into endless distance”).
With its heartsick soul melody, “Something Beautiful,” could have been another cloying Silk Sonic ballad for candlelit bubblebaths. But halfway through Cyrus chucks a live hairdryer in the water and the song erupts in a squall of saxophone, frothing hi-hat, and muscular guitar courtesy of Adam Granduciel. This kind of jazz-rock posturing might seem like a shallow plea to be taken seriously, but as someone who has always longed for Cyrus to make more interesting music (The voice! The charisma!), “Something Beautiful” feels more like the earnest experiment of a pop star famous for taking artistic risks, to varying degrees of success.
Even in its more maudlin verses, “Something Beautiful” is the strongest display of Cyrus’ extraordinary voice on the album. Its texture and fidelity enriches her smoldering alto, heightening each crack at the back of her throat. Her voice sounds at once sculpted and intimate, cradled by Nick Hakim’s light touch on Rhodes piano and Maxx Morando’s restrained snare beat. The problem is: This is as good as it gets. The opening duo of “Prelude” and “Something Beautiful” present a real bait-and-switch dilemma on an album bloated with generic, dated, and lyrically incoherent pop-rock. After the opening fakeout, Something Beautiful coasts along to reheated disco, flaccid fist-pumpers, and schmaltz balladry of a bygone era.
“More to Lose” lands in the latter category, with its soft saxophone and treacly piano keys hinting at some deeper well of experience. It is bad but somewhat intriguing, if only because mainstream pop doesn’t really sound like this anymore—the tearjerkers Bryan Adams mastered on “(Everything I Do) I Do It for You” from Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, or “All for Love” from Disney’s The Three Musketeers (as performed by Adams, Rod Stewart, and Sting). Sadly, “More to Lose” doesn’t slap as hard. A plaintive tale of adult concessions, the song chronicles a dissolving relationship in the faintest outline. The title refers to a spare but very poignant line about how a breakup can rob you of things you never got to experience: “I just thought we had more to lose,” Cyrus sings. “More to Lose” is weighed down with the ghosts of memories never to be shared: A family. A fully booked vacation. The bedsheets on backorder. Unfortunately, Cyrus quickly abandons her efficient phrasing for throwaway lines like: “The TV’s on but I don’t know/My tears are streaming like our favorite show.”
Something Beautiful is crammed with nonsensical lyrics that operate on their own unworldly logic, always in service of a rhyme scheme or syllabic meter rather than actual meaning. In other words: They’re patently dumb. A few favorites: “In my dreams I see your face/It hits me like a thousand trains.” “I’m losing my breath, yes/Boy you’re marking up my neck-lace.” “A tower that’s made of risqué, rude temptation.” A tower made out of what, exactly? What do you mean marking up a necklace?! Cyrus—she of “Butterflies fly away… Party in the U.S.A.” fame—should know that if the songs hit hard enough, we wouldn’t be asking a damn thing.
The most egregious missteps on Something Beautiful are its pop songs. There is nothing remotely close to the tepid but inviting hooks of “Flowers” within its 52-minute runtime, despite many attempts at funk and disco-tinged hits. “Easy Lover” feels like another Bruno Mars castoff, with its walking bassline, stomping beat, and chirping “oohooh-ooh-oohs.” “You’ve got the love I always needed,” Cyrus rasps over Brittany Howard’s electric guitar. “Tie me to horses and I still wouldn’t leave ya.” This one stilted line sums up the entire song: It’s referential, uninspired, and really just a rearrangement of pieces that don’t quite fit in their new configuration.
“Walk of Fame” and “Every Girl You’ve Ever Loved” are atrocious for similar reasons; the sanitized disco beats, the weak self-mythologizing, the drag-diva vocab that’s already been co-opted by major corporations. “Walk of Fame”—as in, “Every time I walk, it’s a walk of fame”—can’t be saved by Danielle Haim’s guitar or Howard’s celestial vocal loop. In fact, Howard helps tank the song by saluting Cyrus with the lamest pop eulogy of all time:
You’ll live foreverIn our hearts and mindsAn ageless pictureA timeless smileWe’ll wear it on our T-shirtsA star buried in the pavementEveryone will walk around it
Naomi Campbell has an even more pointless task on “Every Girl You’ve Ever Loved,” only her lines are so absurd they might be comedic gold. In between Cyrus’ arena-rock belting, Campbell half-whispers reverent non-sequitors like, “She has the perfect scent,” “She speaks the perfect French,” and “She never wears a watch, still she’s never late” in a saggy attempt at ballroom panache. Cyrus has called Something Beautiful her “gayest” album yet, but its “gayest” song sounds like it was engineered by a marketing team trying to spike Fiji Water sales during Pride.
That’s the reigning issue with Something Beautiful: It is more interested in signaling than embodying. Cyrus can access the best musicians and producers, and she can register a genuine interest in more subversive art, but few songs on her new album feel like they emerge from experience, or a burning desire to explore new sounds. It’s possible Cyrus is completely aware of her own limitations here. “I’m in the record business,” she recently told The New York Times. “When I sign a contract, they’re buying records that they wish to sell, so I understand that I am setting myself up to become merchandise.” But then Cyrus said something so vulnerable it was alarming: “At one point in my life, I look forward to just being an artist, untied, untethered. At some point I’ll get to do that.” I wonder what that will sound like.
