Review Summary: Miley Cyrus finally cashes in on her potential to deliver the best work of her career, while making a strong bid for the best pop album of 2025.
For how abundantly clear it is that Miley Cyrus is an extremely talented entertainer, it’s pretty baffling just how unessential her actual music has been since her heel turn as a Rebellious, Sexy Adult a little over a decade ago. Make no mistake, there have been plenty of brilliant sprinkles throughout (“Adore You” and “We Can’t Stop” alone are responsible for me mistaking
Bangerz to be a far better album than it is), but much of her music has failed to escape the almost boogeyman-like shadow of her idiosyncratic antics or make much of an impact at all. That’s not for lack of trying, either! Of anyone who could be accused of being a Main Pop Girl, Miley has routinely made the task of taking in any of her projects more difficult that it needs to be by trashing what had previously been put out and promising what’s to come to be the “real” Miley and “her most mature release yet.” Like Sonic the Hedgehog or Weezer, there have been plenty of moments where I wish the breakneck pace of change would stop to build on fruitful displays of a foundation, but I was never more thankful for the assumed eventual mulligan after 2023’s vacant
Endless Summer Vacation.
Something Beautiful is yet another stab at clarifying who the hell Miley Cyrus
actually is as an artist, but it’s less of a reintroduction than it is a complete reincarnation. Taking cues from every era and then some, it’s the best version of herself by a country mile. It’s a sprawling, joyful, psychedelic adventure with an insane list of collaborators (Alvvays! The Lemon Twigs! Foxygen! The War on Drugs!) that refuses any easy classification, but the chops are routinely proven at every turn to show that each moment is the product of a ton of care, and not a fluke. It’s not the most shocking revelation, for instance, that Miley can pull of Abba worship with aplomb (the stratospheric “End of the World”), but it’s a little more brow-raising when the title track has a more convincing brass apocalypse than Black Country New Road has managed to muster in quite a while. Abbreviated runtime Tik Tok-trend chasing this is not, as the album’s centerpiece “Walk of Fame” is a Brittany Howard-assisted rallying cry about existential impermanence over a rabble-rousing vogue odyssey that might be the best song Magdalena Bay haven’t yet written.
Indeed, there’s a temptation to rattle off the long list of hats that Miley successfully tries on, but they would mean nothing without a vision to hold them together.
Dead Petz was Holds Up Spork-levels of randumb, but the experimentation here really is in service of letting the feeling ruminate and luxuriate -and boy, do they luxuriate. “Every Girl You’ve Ever Loved” is an acrobatic act caked in gold, finding Miley do a saxophone-laden Stevie Nicks impersonation (complete with haymaker lines like “I can hold you like a man/and let you cry like a child”) that subtly evolves into a sweaty house breakdown narrated by none other than Naomi Campbell. The stakes are towering, but the foundation is rock-solid and, crucially, never comes close to feeling gimmicky. That a natural songbook ballad like “More to Lose” feels at home with a laser tag anthem like “Reborn” is a testament to the expert pacing and sequencing.
If there’s any major bone to pick, it’s that “Give Me Love” is a bit of an aimless comedown compared to how breakneck and considered the rest of the experience is. Still,
Something Beautiful is an absolute triumph that casts aside any qualifiers to make a strong bid for the best major pop album of 2025 so far. Miley Cyrus -ostensibly, the real one- has historically been at the top of her game when her albums have plainly reflected its contents (
Breakout was her breakout,
Bangerz had bangers); and with
Something Beautiful, she has created just that.
Pleased to meet you, Miley. I hope you stick around.
