Album Review: Something Beautiful by Miley Cyrus

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.

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Sprawling ninth album is another pleasingly unpredictable swing from one of our more intriguing and exciting pop stars It’s hardly a revelation to say that Miley Cyrus is unconstrained by the norms of the music industry. Whether it be THAT VMA incident, various songs that allude to recreational drugs or an experimental psych-rock album with The Flaming Lips, Cyrus doesn’t do things the conventional way. In a sense, it probably explains her extraordinary longevity.

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Part of the appeal of Cyrus that has become more and more apparent over the years is how increasingly willing she's been to embrace her weirdness. In 2013, she pretty successfully picked up where 2010's really-not-that-wild Can't Be Tamed left off, cutting her coveted long locks into a bleached fauxhawk and twerking on Robin Thicke with a foam finger before releasing Bangerz -- an uneven album, to be sure, but one with some bona fide hits. In 2015, she entered her Grateful Dead era with the Flaming Lips-assisted surprise Soundcloud release, Miley Cyrus & Her Dead Petz.

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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.

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Miley Cyrus has always followed her muse. Since at least her 2013 reinvention “Bangerz,” she’s tried on multiple personas and styles, traipsing from du jour hip-hop to glam rock and glitter-smeared psychedelia, oftentimes falling somewhere in between. If anything, one could never accuse Cyrus of ambivalence; her creative vision is always whole, even when it defies tangibility.

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Never one to shy away from transformation (she did first find fame leading a double life, after all), Miley Cyrus has, over the course of eight studio albums, proved herself to be quite the chameleon. We've seen her inhabit the role of pop disruptor ('Bangerz'), psych oddball ('Miley Cyrus & Her Dead Petz'), rock chick ('Plastic Hearts'), and perennial country girl (Beyoncé collab 'II MOST WANTED'), while her last outing - 2023's 'Endless Summer Vacation' - bore the record-breaking smash single 'Flowers'. It's unsurprising, then, that her ninth full-length sees her shapeshift once again - this time, into a high-camp diva who, for the most part, delivers.

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If the career of Miley Cyrus has taught fans anything, it's to expect the unexpected. Equally at home on a pop super-smash and a Flaming Lips acid trip , she's emerged as a cultural rebel, someone who seeks to challenge herself - and her audience - at every turn. 'Something Beautiful' is a step away from the carnal pop that adorned 2023 release 'Endless Summer Vacation', opting instead for a delicately crafted feast of melodic intricacy.

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