Movie Star in a Worn-Out Coat: Miley Cyrus' Vintage Glam
Her first new album since the blockbuster "Flowers" draws inspiration from classic rock, but keeps its heart on the dance floor.
Miley Cyrus - Something Beautiful
Miley Cyrus has spent a lifetime in show business, evolving from child star to enfant terrible to dependable pro. Given her status as an industry lifer, it’s faintly surprising that “Flowers,” her lite-disco self-love anthem, marked the first time she was honored with a Grammy— the ultimate show of institutional credibility.
Just over a year later, Cyrus is back with a new album called Something Beautiful, capitalizing on her institutional support in the best way possible— investing all the respect and goodwill she’s accrued into something weird and adventurous. It’s an album that asks listeners to trust her as she tries on some new sounds and colors, yet it never loses sight of the pop sensibilities and good old-fashioned showmanship that made her a star in the first place. It’s her most satisfying album yet— charismatic, surprising, loads of fun.
Even in the ways it departs from her previous albums, Something Beautiful indirectly attests to her status as a classicist and standard-bearer. Before the album’s release, Cyrus described it as a more glamorous update on Pink Floyd’s The Wall. She may be exploring new creative avenues, but she’s using the classic rock canon as map and compass.
Mercifully, The Wall influence is more about feel than anything else. This is not a sociopolitical statement in the vein of Roger Waters; in fact, as Madison Bloom writes in a slightly-too-harsh Pitchfork pan, it’s not even a proper concept album, getting all the formal trappings but neglecting to find a central narrative or conceit.
Where Something Beautiful wears its Floydian influences well— and where it triumphs as a piece of arthouse-coded pop expression— is in the way it manages to be both incredibly vibey and consistently song-oriented. While there may not be a discernible storyline here there is a pervading mood, a sonic and emotional palette that gives the album cohesion and direction— it’s there in the portentous synths and murmured spoken word of the prelude, sounding faintly like the kind of nerdy dystopianism you’d hear on a classic Rush album, and it’s there in the moody interludes that stitch the album together.
All that rock opera scaffolding supports a rich, tuneful set of songs that work equally well as companion pieces or as standalone singles— and if there isn’t anything here that feels as instantly zeitgeist-forming as “Flowers,” Something Beautiful may be the most consistent song-by-song album Cyrus has yet made. Its 52 minutes span seething guitar rock (listen to the eruptive wails of the title song), slinky funk (“Easy Lover”), kinetic club music (“Walk of Fame”), and party-ready pop (“End of the World,” complete with neon synth washes).
In other words, she wasn’t kidding about the glam: Something Beautiful uses the trappings of a hifalutin concept album not to tell a grand story or make a splashy statement, but to allow Cyrus a chance to dress up in the vintage threads of capital-A art rock. In “More to Lose,” an early-album standout, she romanticizes a paramour who looks like “a movie star in a worn-out coat”— the perfect image for Something Beautiful’s aesthetic, at once dingy and bedazzled, lived-in but still elegant.
Give some of the credit to producer Shawn Everett for costuming Miley in such alluring hand-me-downs. He’s worked with everyone from Kacey Musgraves to The Killers, but his most relevant data point may be helming Alvvays’ instant-classic Blue Rev— a helpful antecedent for this album’s sound, which is thoroughly processed and heavily textured but still feels appealingly messy, spontaneous, and warm.
As for Cyrus, her smokey rasp remains one of the most powerful instruments in pop music— and as with this year’s tremendous Lady Gaga album, Something Beautiful demonstrates how a truly pro singer can elevate her material through the sheer power of her phrasing, willing good songs into great ones. You’ll hear that most clearly on the power ballads, an old-fashioned idiom of which Cyrus remains the master— listen to her wring pathos from the lovelorn “More to Lose,” raw desire from “Golden Burning Sun.”
It’s not hard to imagine those power ballads on, say, an imperial Aerosmith album or late-90s movie soundtrack— but they’re not the only evidence here of Cyrus’ rock and roll credentials. (See also the Joan Jett/Stevie Nicks-featuring Plastic Hearts from 2021— Miley has been a glam rocker for a minute now.) The title track lurches with violent stabs of prog-rock guitar, while the thumping disco track “Walk of Fame” makes a racket of a different kind, looping a banshee wail vocal from Brittany Howard.
That song leads off a sequence of club bangers that kick the album’s back half into high gear— keeping the energy bubbly and building toward a rapturous finale, but occasionally overindulging. Indeed, at six minutes long, the throbbing runway groove of “Walk of Fame” is appealing, but a little too long; for Miley, quick and direct is always more winsome.
She gets there on “Easy Lover,” a slinky tune originally written for Cowboy Carter— and while the version here suggests little of country twang, it does hint at simmering southern soul, dressed up in chic disco strings. Just as good is “End of the World,” written and performed with members of Alvvays— a chiming, stadium-ready anthem, complete with a singalong “whoa whoa” chorus.
To the extent that there is any kind of lyrical throughline here, “End of the World” hints at it— more than The Wall, Something Beautiful seems to take its thematic cues from Prince’s 1999, promising intimacy and celebration even amidst apocalypse and ruin. It’s a thematic conceit that lends real urgency to Cyrus’ songs of love and loss, imbuing the vaguely kinky “Pretend You’re God” with higher stakes, helping “More to Lose” feel at once like the eulogy for faded love but perhaps also for a world that seems like its slowly dying.
“Tell me something beautiful about this world,” she sings on the title track, as though she’s desperate for a reminder that there’s still goodness out there somewhere. That undercurrent of desperation brings an edge to both the joy and the sadness on this album— and if that doesn’t make it as sophisticated or complex as one of those classic concept albums, it does make it a stylish and resonant high watermark for Miley Cyrus.
My rating: 8.0 out of 10.