Before this month’s column, some news: My book The Rise And Rise Of Chappell Roan: The Stories Behind The Songs, Tours, And Birth Of An Icon, co-written with London culture writer Hamza Jahanzeb, comes out this September via Hachette. I do deep dives into all the Chappell singles I’ve covered here, and the many more she’s released throughout her career, up to the Grammys and “The Giver.” The book also has plenty of supergraphic ultramodern red wine supernova femininomenal stuff like photos and tour anecdotes and fashion moments. Learn more here!

Earlier this month, Miley Cyrus did a big spot on the Zane Lowe show, promoting her new album and film Something Beautiful. The Miley in that interview may not match the Miley in your mind. She still speaks with the unassuming folksiness and unapologetic bluntness she’s become very known for. But when she discusses the album, she speaks with a newfound precision and poise. Unlike some artists, who seem disengaged with the details of their own music even as they’re promoting it, Miley has a lot to say about every facet of every sound. She projects confidence — often even gravitas. That shouldn’t be surprising — Miley’s from a famous family and has herself been famous since her tweenage years, with all the PR training that background can buy. She’s also, as of last year, the recipient of one of the Grammys’ two biggest awards. Her maturity shouldn’t surprise anyone. But I’m guessing that for many of you, especially those of you who were tuned into music around 2013, it kind of does.

Yes, twelve years after her VMAs debacle, Miley Cyrus is still walking through the valley of the Bangerz of death. And she knows it. That’s the whole premise of her recent single “Used To Be Young,” a reflective ballad that she released on the 10-year anniversary of the awards: In the video, Cyrus takes an empty, dark stage as if delivering a late-career curtain call, until the silhouette lifts to reveal Hannah Montana-esque Y2K makeup and a Mickey Mouse shirt. As she emotes directly into the camera, she seems to be reconciling her Disney-kid past and her thirtysomething figure (while skipping all twerking in between): “You say I used to be wild — I say I used to be young.”

Miley’s other recent single, “Flowers,” was reflective in a different way: a magnanimous, ever-so-slightly-shady midtempo single about her split from ex-husband Liam Hemsworth. The song seemed undislodgeable as a hit — it logged more weeks as No. 1 on various Billboard charts than any other song, ever — and earned Miley her first Grammy after 16 years, for Record Of The Year. After the win, Cyrus said, she realized that her affectations of brattiness throughout the 2010s were partly a way to avoid acknowledging how much getting that award would mean to her. Receiving that critical recognition was really important to her — both as an affirmation of her worth and as a blank check. As she told Lowe: “Once I received my Grammy, I was like, look, when you Google me, it says Miley Cyrus, a Grammy Award-winning artist. I’m gonna make some of my weird shit.”

The weird shit, in this case, is Something Beautiful, an album and accompanying film scheduled for a couple one-and-done screenings in June. (A few sympathetic fans have already seen it at an invite-only Spotify listening event earlier this month; alas, the few Letterboxd reviews that have leaked from the night reveal nothing.) Miley hasn’t toured any of her albums since Bangerz — which is probably part of why people still associate her with it — and still doesn’t want to; Something Beautiful is meant to serve as a surrogate tour, like Taylor Swift’s Eras without the actual Eras shows. But she also wants the album/film to be more than that. She’s described the movie as a “one of a kind pop opera fueled by fantasy,” and she’s not subtle about its aspirations. One of the first shots of the trailer is an empty stage lit up by a “MILEY” marquee graphic, with big Impact-typography that invokes Beyoncé’s “FEMINIST” staging at the 2014 VMAs.

How much cinema is in this cinematic experience is not clear, and Cyrus has mostly talked around the question. “There’s not really a synopsis because the music is the story,” she said on Jimmy Kimmel Live. “There was no need for characterization because I’m the character.” Less self-referentially, she described the album in Harper’s Bazaar as “[Pink Floyd’s] The Wall, but with a better wardrobe and more glamorous and filled with pop culture.” As an interpretation of The Wall, this is somewhere in the neighborhood of Doug Walker. As a statement of ambition, though, it’s the stuff of pop triumph — if you can deliver.

And for the most part, she does! Something Beautiful is easily the best record of Miley Cyrus’s career, and it isn’t close. This isn’t her first swing at making a big ambitious concept album — 2019’s SHE IS COMING was supposed to be the first of three themed EPs but ended up being the only one released, for reasons that will become obvious if you listen to it. (Cyrus may well agree; on the Something Beautiful interview circuit, she seems to be distancing herself from her older music that isn’t “Flowers.”) But it’s the first one that’s actually worked.

Miley always had it in her. She’s long had one of the most recognizable voices in pop music, with a charming folk-rock crackle and surprising vocal force when she summons it. (Unfortunately, the mixing on the album sometimes muddies that aspect of her voice — most noticeably on the chorus of “Every Girl You’ve Ever Loved.”) And she’s always been drawn to weirdness — Miley Cyrus & Her Dead Petz, her Flaming Lips/Mike Will Made It sidequest, also contains some genuinely weird shit, and by most accounts was not something her record label really wanted out of her. (Incidentally, at a listening party in LA just last night Miley promised her next album will be “extremely experimental.”) And there’s genuinely weird shit on Something Beautiful too, though perhaps less weird in sound than in unexpectedness. The title track sounds like straightforward smoky neo-soul until producer Jonathan Rado (yes, the Foxygen guy) busts out some G.O.O.D. Music-esque squalls of distortion — which is basically what 070 Shake’s doing now, but still a sudden thrill to hear. “Reborn” is an amalgamation of Gregorian chants, electronica-when-it-was-called-electronica, and a particular kind of late-’90s vocal snarl; it would have killed on the Buffy soundtrack. Two interludes mix movie-trailer strings with Run Lola Run type beats; if the music is the story, as Cyrus said, that story is Ghost In The Shell drama, and I love that for her.

But those are still interludes; the majority of Something Beautiful is going for something else. Most of the album was helmed by producer/engineer Shawn Everett, who’s had a lengthy career producing for with critical darlings like Alabama Shakes. (He’s also probably the only guy in the industry who’s worked with Weezer, Kim Gordon, Leighton Meester, and Kathy Griffin.) The clearest throughline of his work is a kind of pleasant, sun-dappled pop-rock with Rolling Stone-ish taste, and that’s the throughline of Something Beautiful as well. The lead single “End Of The World” (which features Alvvays’ Molly Rankin and Alec O’Hanley) is the album’s clearest attempt to get Cyrus another dominant chart run — the crowd-pleasing wordless hook almost segues into a millennial whoop. But its influences are of a statelier era: “Dancing Queen” piano taps and a Skeeter Davis mindset. A lot of the rest of the record sounds like Cher’s ’90s album Believe — possibly a deliberate influence, as Miley recently covered the title track and “Flowers” already sounded like “Strong Enough.” And even more of it sounds like Fleetwood Mac.

There are two credited guests on the album, each representing an elevated kind of fame. Supermodel Naomi Campbell has a spoken-word bridge on the Gaga/Madonna-esque “Every Girl You’ve Ever Loved” that rolls out the proverbial red carpet for Miley: “She has the perfect scent/ She speaks the perfect French/ She can dance the night away, and still she’ll never break a sweat.” And Brittany Howard of Alabama Shakes is the roaring vocal generator that powers “Walk Of Fame,” a diva turn and a treat for everyone who loved Howard’s What Now. That’s not Howard’s only appearance on the album, either; “Easy Lover” was a Plastic Hearts demo that Miley pitched to Beyoncé when she was soliciting country tracks for Cowboy Carter, and Howard offered to play guitar on the track so they could leave in the adlib “tell ’em, B!”

What this all adds up to is Grammy bait. That’s deliberate: Cyrus told Lowe that the artists she wants to put Something Beautiful in conversation with are not today’s pop girlies, but the likes of Prince and David Bowie and Madonna and even Björk. (Knowing a potential gaffe when she hears one, Cyrus was quick to clarify that her music and fanbase are really different from those of the Icelandic auteur.) Her Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame bids do occasionally slip from ambition into imitation. Usually this happens on her bridges and outros. “Easy Lover” traces the outlines of Chaka Khan’s “Ain’t Nobody” for a few choruses before outright quoting the melody, and Naomi Campbell’s takeover of “Every Girl You’ve Ever Loved” eventually tracks “Vogue” so exactly, down to its last echoed seconds, that I’m kind of questioning Cyrus’s legal team. But for the most part, she makes her case for rock-institution cred surprisingly well; I wouldn’t be surprised if this does well at the actual awards. Whether the Bangerz-remembering, “Flowers”-accepting, non-industry musical public will also hear that case remains to be seen. Miley’s at peace with it either way; as she told Lowe: “I bring my fans along with me… and then when I show up and I deliver, it takes a minute for everyone to catch up sometimes.” Consider this a check-in.

POP TEN

CLOSING TIME