Review Summary: I'm almost disappointed
Younger Now is the sixth studio album by singer, songwriter, and actress, Miley Cyrus and the follow up to 2015’s Miley Cyrus & Her Dead Petz, a collaboration album with The Flaming Lips. However, I wasn’t looking for any psychedelic or experimental music at the time, so I was fairly happy to just leave it and ignore Miley Cyrus’ existence for the foreseeable future.
But then, Malibu happened in 2017 as Miley took a dramatic swerve away from the psychedelic music that she made on her fifth album, and more towards more grounded, rootsy, personal stuff. And while Malibu didn’t wow me, I was on board with Miley Cyrus more than ever. As such, I was willing to give this new album, Younger Now somewhat of a chance. So how did Younger Now turn out?
Honestly, I’m not sure. While Younger Now by Miley Cyrus is a tolerable album, how much you enjoy it will ultimately boil down to how much you can tolerate the fact that this album is purely a love letter to Liam Hemsworth and nothing else, which takes us nicely onto the main talking point surrounding this album, the lyrics and themes. And I’ll say this to Miley’s credit, she sure doesn’t make a boring album, at least in the writing as she explores her and Liam’s relationship from many different angles. Of course, you’ve got your straight up love songs about Liam like ‘Malibu’ and the incredibly cliché ‘I Would Die For You’, but you also have songs that deal with much more interesting subject matter. The first of those is ‘Younger Now’ with has lines like ‘I’m not afraid of who I used to be’ which shows a willingness to look back on her past and her artistic progression as an artist and accept all of it, regardless of how questionable those artistic progressions were.
The other one is ‘She’s Not Him’ that focuses on her previous relationship with Stella Maxwell and how, as she says in the first verse, she appreciates the brief time that herself and Stella had together, but also how her heart has always been with Liam, going as far as to say, ‘And you don’t deserve all the bull*** I’ve put you through / You deserve a heart much bigger than on that’s torn in two’.
These are great moments, but they have to balance out moments like ‘Week Without You’ where Miley goes over all the things that she’d rather do instead of being with her companion. A fair enough idea on the surface, but then you realise that if this is really how she feels, what reason is there to stay together? Miley attempts to poorly justify staying with this guy in the outro by singing ‘You know I'd miss you, babe’, but I don’t buy it. This combined with songs like ‘Inspired’ that try to come across as inspiring but is more drained and uninteresting than anything else push this album back a lot.
It doesn’t help that the production and instrumentation on these eleven tracks are rather bland across the board. From agreeable, slower paced songs like ‘Inspired’ and ‘Miss You So Much’, the latter of which actually having a decent acoustic groove to it, the stiffer percussion on ‘Younger Now’ and ‘Thinkin’’ the latter complete with a rigid stuttered chorus, and the clumsily produced ‘Rainbowland’ that completely wastes Dolly Parton are all moments where I feel like there could have been something more, especially if there was more organic sounding, textured percussion.
That being said, there are some moments in the instrumentation that I do like. I’m not a huge fan of ‘Bad Mood’, especially the vocal production, but the inclusion of more textured percussion is a nice fit. ‘Love Yourself’, despite the stiffer percussion has an undeniably catchy hook, and the production that matches the brutal honesty of ‘She’s Not Him’ really quite well, along with the faint rustle of percussion on ‘I Would Die For You’ were nice touches.
Ultimately, this album is a mixed bag. Never horrifically detestable, never blowing me away.
Best Songs: ‘She’s Not Him’, ‘Younger Now’, ‘Love Someone’
Worst Songs: ‘Week Without You’, ‘Thinkin’’