Miley Cyrus has made some very grand claims for her ninth album. Something Beautiful is not merely a concept album, but one the 32-year-old pop star has described as “an attempt to medicate somewhat of a sick culture through music”. One filled with “healing sound properties” designed to “impact frequencies in your body that make you vibrate at a different level”. And it’s not just all of that, but an accompanying film as well: a “one-of-a-kind pop opera” apparently inspired by Alan Parker’s 1982 film adaptation of Pink Floyd’s The Wall “but with a better wardrobe and more glamorous”.
For all that the executives at Cyrus’s label are unlikely to say no to a huge star whose last album featured the world’s biggest-selling single of 2023 – Flowers, 2.7bn streams – you can still imagine them swallowing very hard when presented with all this. After all, Cyrus has form when it comes to going wildly off-piste: Bangerz, her biggest-selling album, was followed with Miley Cyrus & Her Dead Petz, a sprawling collection of stoned jokes, musical non-sequiturs and psychedelic collaborations with the Flaming Lips. Furthermore, when her record label suggested that an hour and a half of this might try her fans’ patience, Cyrus’s response was to make Petz even longer, by including a recording of her playing Tibetan singing bowls.
Cyrus also has form for announcing releases that don’t quite fit their initial billing: 2017’s not-actually-very “country” album Younger Now; 2020’s Plastic Hearts, which presented itself as new-wave rock, with guest appearances from Joan Jett and Billy Idol and its logo borrowed from shock-rockers the Plasmatics, but turned out to be all over the shop stylistically. So it proves here. The film has no more in common with Parker’s adaptation of The Wall than it does Mrs Brown’s Boys: D’Movie. It has absolutely no plot, not because it’s a wilfully confusing exercise in non-linear arthouse cinema, but because it’s just a load of pop videos, albeit divided into three “acts” and interspersed with spoken-word interludes.
A lot of them are straightforward in-studio performances; the rest look like extended perfume commercials: Miley Cyrus walking through a film studio’s backlot in a pair of fluorescent blue furry chaps, or down Hollywood Boulevard at night in order to do a spot of writhing around on Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Walk of Fame star. Miley Cyrus pretending to ride a motorbike and palling around with Naomi Campbell in matching bustiers and heels. It’s perhaps for the best that it isn’t a contemporary remake of The Wall, an album and film that’s essentially about a multimillionaire’s peevish solipsism and bitter score-settling – there’s already quite enough ofthatin 2025, thank you. Nevertheless, you do wonder if premiering it at the Tribeca film festival doesn’t amount to gilding the lily a little.
A similar sense of “huh?” attends the album itself, given the talk of healing sound properties and indeed of Cyrus wishing to be “a human psychedelic”. It certainly gets off to a relatively left-field start. The title track opens like an old-fashioned soul ballad, complete with tasteful horns, then erupts into a chorus thick with distorted vocals and crashing, discordant rock guitar. But thereafter it turns much more straightforward: sparkly 80s pop sprinkled with Dancing Queen-ish piano flourishes on End of the World; Easy Lover’s lightly disco-laced soft rock; ballads that are, respectively, synthy (More to Lose) and primed to soundtrack the end credits of a movie rather more substantial than the one Cyrus has made (Give Me Love).
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The album’s second half focuses more on the dancefloor: pumping four-to-the-floor beats, a preponderance of Patrick Cowley and Bobby O synthesisers. The choruses melodically evoke a variety of music from continental Europe: French chanson on Reborn, Abba (again) on Every Girl You’ve Ever Loved, balls-out Eurovision finalist on Walk of Fame. What it really recalls is hi-NRG, the electronic soundtrack of choice in mid-80s gay clubs. Reanimating this sound isn’t a bad idea – it’s one of the few areas of 80s pop that the 21st century has yet to really scavenge from – and it’s done really well here. The synths sound edgy, the choruses stick, there’s a smattering of knowing period details (Syndrums, sampled orchestral stabs), and it’s a delight to hear Brittany Howard of Alabama Shakes repurposing her voice as a stentorian Grace Jones-y roar on Walk of Fame.
If the rest of the album steadfastly fails to make the listener vibrate at a different level – it’s all about as psychedelic as a baked potato – and you struggle to identify any kind of concept, it’s still all very well written and well made, a varied succession of good vehicles for Cyrus’s powerfully raspy voice. What it lacks is the kind of obvious smash-hit single by which her albums stand or fall commercially: the most obvious candidates, End of the World and Every Girl You’ve Ever Loved, are strong but not undeniable. Rather than the disparity betweenCyrus’s intentions for Something Beautiful and the reality, it’s that which might doom it to a muted reception.
Saint Etienne – GladA marvellous single heralds Saint Etienne’s final album: a collaboration with Chemical Brother Tom Rowlands that puts a perfect pop spin on his psych-y breakbeat backing.