Written by
Miley Cyrus might be pop music’s staunchest contrarian. When critics begged her to tone it down after the 2013 VMAs, she dropped an acid Day-Glo vanity project with a Tibetan singing bowl instrumental and track titles like “Fucking Fucked Up” and “I’m So Drunk.” And for as long as we’ve demanded she turn it up a notch, she’s been trying to settle down. “We never get to see ourselves sleeping peacefully next to the ones that we love,” she lamented on the Miley Cyrus & Her Dead Petz outlier “Lighter,” hinting at where she wanted to go even amid the most dubious aesthetic swerve of her career: next to you in Malibu, basically. Whether she’s playing a party animal, a psychonaut, or a retro rock provocateur, the impulse driving Cyrus has always been more staid than it appears. She never wanted the party to last forever.
On Bass Persuades, Cyrus’ follow-up to 2025’s turgid and Pink Floyd-“inspired” Something Beautiful, it appears she’s stopped in her tracks. Cyrus has gushed about the domestic bliss she’s found these days, happily sober and engaged to frequent collaborator Maxx Morando. At least Something Beautiful was a big swing-and-miss; Bass Persuades barely leaves an impression. Shuffling through the diluted glam-rock and disco-pop schmaltz that has weighed her down since 2020’s Plastic Hearts, Bass Persuades wonders why today’s “kids don’t want to dance,” then gives them absolutely nothing to dance to.
No score yet, be the first to add.
Cyrus has thankfully culled her collaborators post-Something Beautiful, but the cadre she’s kept could care less about building back better. Kid Harpoon and Michael Pollack, the same duo who helped churn out “Flowers,” return at steamroller force, flattening any and all signs of fun. “REDLIGHTS” shoots for ABBA and lands like something off their immersive museum’s waiting room soundtrack, coating Cyrus’ knockout timbre in an unnecessary robotic sheen. “Let’s Get Married” is yet another Bruno Mars-minded clunker, devoid of passion. Can’t she cut these jokers and her ever-present fiancé creatively loose? Does Morando need to be the fourth-chair producer on almost every song, not including a clumsy tearjerker about living in his orbit? (It’s called “Orbit.”) Like Rihanna, Cyrus wields a star quality that speaks for itself: She does not need to (nor, frankly, should she) write her own songs. But neither should these guys.
Sometimes, Cyrus sways toward more compelling perspectives. “Different Religion” reunites her with Model/Actriz’s Cole Haden, whose abrasive glam rock she clearly aspires to recreate—if you squint and focus on his feature, it could be a Pirouette B-side. But Haden can’t quite deliver the track from the hollow gesturing that dogged Something Beautiful, auteurism sans vision. She’s at her best when she ditches the reference board altogether, as on the confounding “Neon Signs,” a late-night hookup waltz bizarre enough to feel inventive. Casting Miike Snow’s Andrew Wyatt as, I assume, an Elvis impersonator she picked up after the longest drive-thru chapel shift of his life, Cyrus crafts a sex jam so profoundly sexless it becomes pure absurdism. Who wants to do it to the sultry sounds of a cuckoo clock in “Blue Danube” time, with a guy who mouth-breathes, “Some people say I’m creepy”? Beats me, but at least it piqued my curiosity.
“Aftermath,” a galloping ballad blissfully unaware that pop radio has evolved since 2017, also stands out by recapturing some of the propelling force of her work with Mark Ronson. “I’m sick of poets and being profound,” Cyrus warbles before expanding, “You were mine.” This three-word chorus alone is the album’s best showcase of the immense resilience of her voice, ropey and distinctive enough to make one of the most well-worn sentences in the English language sting like it’s the very first time. Unfortunately, it has to share airtime with nonsense like “I miss the future like a face I forgot/Like worms miss the earth in the bottom of a pot.”
Despite her questionable taste, Cyrus has persisted as a tastemaker—after all, she paved the way for Gen Z’s biggest and burgeoning stars with her own pratfalls. ADÉLA, the of-the-moment Slovakian pop star who learned English by watching Hannah Montana, has a smash in the “We Can’t Stop” mutation of “Ain’t in LA.” Nouveau face of racial panic Nettspend is sampling “23”; Chappell Roan, when she appeared in Cyrus’ 20th-anniversary Hannah Montana special, told her, “You literally walked so I can run.” Even Sabrina Carpenter has taken a few pointers from Miley moves once widely considered missteps: Her horndog “Juno” poses wouldn’t have taken flight like they did without the precedent of Cyrus throwing it back on a foam finger.
Across the furthest reaches of post-millennial pop culture, Miley is an enduring reference point: for boundary-pushing flops, for going rock, for not giving a fuck what anyone thinks. She’s just cool, the type of icon secure enough in herself to sprinkle some stardust on whoever needs it. Yet 10 albums in, her charisma is still frustratingly at odds with her music, which sounds stuck in a spin cycle around the same artistic void. Everyone else is just being Miley; why is she struggling so?
