Something Beautiful review: ‘An album only Miley Cyrus could make’

In a recent sit down with Zane Lowe, Miley Cyrus said that the validation she received following the mammoth commercial and critical success of ‘Flowers’, her 2023 smash hit, she finally “felt free to make the album that I’ve been craving kind of my whole adult career.”

That conceit is wholly evident to anyone familiar with Cyrus’s repertoire when listening to Something Beautiful, her ninth studio album, as nods to the singer’s many distinct eras can be heard throughout. The album was released with an accompanying feature film, described as a “pop opera”, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival earlier this month, and from which the star has been drip feeding singles and videos, each markedly different from the last, leaving fans without a clear picture of what this album might sound like.

Something Beautiful opens with a spoken word prelude, one of many tracks here co-produced by Cyrus’s current beau Maxx Morando, which feels as though it is picking up where ‘Handstand’, a psychedellic stand out from the singer’s last album Endless Summer Vacation, left off. From there we move swiftly onto the LP’s title track, which begins with Cyrus crooning: “Tell me something beautiful tonight until your lips turn blue.” Singing over a simple piano melody, Cyrus lulls the listener into a false sense of security, sounding like the world’s most impressive lounge singer, before the song explodes into what might be her closest foray towards hard rock yet. The song’s sharp descent into a scuzzy darkness leaves you wondering – is this what Plastic Hearts, the star’s 2021 rock-leaning album (and home to much of her strongest work), was supposed to sound like?

The mood lifts considerably on ‘End Of The World’, an ABBA-nodding ditty in which Cyrus opts for a classic, bombastic pop sound as she suggests to her lover they put up blinders to their shared sense impending doom, a sentiment which will surely resonate universally in the year 2025. On ‘More To Lose’, one of the albums most memorable songs, the star channels Adele for what is a truly gorgeous, cinematic ballad on which she bleats: “Yeah, you’re looking like a movie star, in a worn coat, so I throw away my mind. It happens all the time.” The song, made distinct by her signature raspy vocal, also plays an important role on any Cyrus album as it serves as another entry into her canon of songs which may or may not be about ex-husband Liam Hemsworth.

The standard remains high as we transition into ‘Easy Lover’, an instantly infectious, groovy ode to a partner so good they “make it hard to touch another”. The song, which Cyrus recently revealed began its life in sessions for Plastic Hearts before being reworked for consideration on Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter, is enhanced by the singer’s natural country twang. The song’s raw sexuality evokes the vibe of ‘Bang Me Box’, a sleazy cut from Cyrus’s criminally underrated, trippy Soundcloud album Miley Cyrus & Her Dead Petz, whilst its Ryan Tedder-assisted lyrics will ensure its remains stuck in your brain for days. The song’s video, which sees Miley strutting around a Hollywood lot before a dance sequence which looks like she’s in the best Diet Coke advert you’ve ever seen, is similarly a treat.

It has to be said that some tracks from the album’s middle section, like the dreamy, Beatles-esque mid-tempo ‘Golden Burning Sun’ and the woozy ‘Pretend Your God’, benefit hugely from being experienced with the accompanying visuals, if only to help you distinguish them from each other. The spirit of Dead Petz is alive and well on these songs, as they too share a sort of blitzed out, stoned quality. Sandwiched between these two however, is ‘Walk Of Fame’, on which the chameleonic artist takes us to the club for the first time and tells us frankly: “Every time I walk, it’s a walk of fame.” The Brittany Howard-featuring 80s stomper would not sound out of place on MAYHEM, and in the accompanying music video Cyrus is certainly going toe to toe with an ‘Edge of Glory’-era Gaga as she cavorts around the Hollywood Walk of Fame in vintage Mugler. At one point she’s seen writhing around on the star of Arnold Schwarzenegger – perhaps a cheeky wink to the Terminator actor’s son Patrick, another famous of ex of hers?

‘Every Girl You’ve Ever Loved’ plays in a similar campy wheelhouse, elevated by Cyrus’s powerhouse vocals which are employed to full effect here, though it suffers from the artist indulging one of her worst impulses, that of a quasi-drag queen, with an Naomi Campbell feature in which the supermodel deadpans the word ‘pose’ on repeat. We remain on the dancefloor for one more outing on ‘Reborn’, which begins as a pulsating sex jam, reminiscent of some of Madonna’s clubbier 90s output (‘Erotica’, ‘Bedtime Story’ and ‘Nothing Really Matters’ all feel like important aural reference points here), but interestingly metamorphoses into a soaring anthem to regenerating with a lover. Here, the singer’s exhilirated screams of “Give me all your love” recall the thrill of career highlight ‘Midnight Sky’.

The album ends on a strange note with ‘Give Me Love’, a theatrical, Beach Boys-aping fairytale which feels a little out of place on this collection of altogether more stylish, edgier songs.

“Self control is not something I’m working on,” Cyrus once proudly sang on Dead Petz, but on Something Beautiful it would seem that it is an art she has mastered. The album is undoubtedly her most musically rich effort to date, and she manages maintain a sense of cohesion depsite the LP’s tendency to sharply jump between genres thanks to the album’s consistent callbacks to the classic pop and rock sounds which shaped her tastes. And while it obviously returns to sounds and ideas she has touched on before, it mostly elevates them to feeling more polished and fully embodied than her previous attempts. It also leaves you, for once, with no doubt that this was the album as she always intended it.

Where it falls down, at times, is an overriding sense that she is an artist perhaps without a huge amount to say at this juncture in her life and career. We can gather from the her recent press cycle that she essentially had carte blanche to do whatever she wanted post ‘Flowers’, and that too is apparent here. Seemingly unconcerned with the trending sounds of 2025, Cyrus, who has always been a clear scholar of pop, often wearing her references on her sleeve, is unlikely to convert many new fans with this material. But for those who have watched this one-of-a-kind artist’s singular path into adulthood, she has delivered on the metric by which fans set their expectation of her highest – she has made yet another album that only Miley Cyrus could make.