Long before its release, Something Beautiful came dressed in expectation. Miley Cyrus described her ninth studio album as “like The Wall, but with a better wardrobe and more glamorous and filled with pop culture.” The reference to Roger Waters’ 1979 rock opera of alienation and artifice feels less about sonic resemblance than bold ambition.
Cyrus has always been a musical shape-shifter — from Disney darling to provocative pop princess on Bangerz, through the country-tinged pop of Younger Now, to the sun-bleached LA introspections on 2023’s Endless Summer Vacation. Something Beautiful picks up the female empowerment undertones beneath the summery facade of its predecessor, while experimenting with a far more radical soundscape. It’s not an easy album. It doesn’t want to be. Instead, Something Beautiful positions itself as an experience — a dreamlike arc through memory, grief, beauty, and hope.
The album opens with ‘Prelude’, a whispered spoken-word piece set against a stripped-back, icy production. “Can something be beautiful if no one sees it?” Cyrus asks. It’s a question that seeps through the rest of the album. There’s something mournful about the track, as if we’re being let into a sacred, damaged space. It’s a strong mood-setter, and the album never quite snaps out of its trance state.
The clash of sonic styles is evident on the title track, which opens as a dreamy ballad with soothing vocals, subtle snare drums, and horns — before suddenly exploding into a chorus of crashing metal, screeching guitar, and distorted vocals. It’s a song that makes the listener sit up and realise that this journey isn’t straightforward,but that’s the point: beauty in this world comes in all forms.
No sooner has the synapse-stretching mishmash of ‘Something Beautiful’ faded than Cyrus changes pitch with the joyful ABBA-esque bop ‘End of the World’. For a song about impending doom — literally or metaphorically (“Do the things that we were way too terrified of before…Hold me close, you know tomorrow isn’t comin’ for sure”) — it’s celebratory. Sparkling, upbeat, and packed with earworm lyrics and hooks, the track is a burst of hope and light in difficult times.
The emotional low point of Something Beautiful is ‘More to Lose’. Its stripped-back piano, layered synths, and crashing drums add to the haunted ambience. The cinematic track feels like it belongs in a montage in an ’80s romance movie. It’s a hard listen for anyone who has found themselves in a crumbling relationship, with lyrics like: “Oh, I knew someday you’d do what I couldn’t do // I just thought we had more to lose.” The cleverness lies in its placement just after the fun of the previous track — a reality bite.
Something Beautiful shifts tone again with a brief interlude before entering its second act on ‘Easy Lover’. Melancholy gives way to the light-rock style of Fleetwood Mac, as Cyrus sings an ode to her latest love against a breezy, upbeat backing. The record then swerves to a second interlude; a jolting, Giorgio Moroder-esque cacophony of shimmering synths and beats.
Despite the bold promise of a concept album, the journey here is well-trodden. The sequence — heartbreak and destruction followed by redemption and renewal — is familiar. However, the constant here is the presence of beauty. Not just surface beauty, but the intangible kind found in chaos: moments of grace within collapse.
The beginning of the final part of the album is a standout moment: ‘Golden Burning Sun’. It is another piece of shimmering West Coast light rock, with Cyrus’s vocals rising against a summery backdrop that echoes with the sound of the Malibu coast. The track blazes with optimism and a message about savouring the moment, surrendering to the beauty of love.
As well as beauty, lyrical restraint runs throughout this album. Cyrus has learned the power of subtlety, where previous albums saw lyrics delivered with the blunt force of a ‘Wrecking Ball’. What helps is how the layered production carries much of the emotion, allowing her to explore the range in her voice, so that even when it does rise, it does so with more nuance, adding to the album’s theme of beauty.
That said, not everything lands. In its determination to be chameleon-like, occasionally dreamlike, parts of act three blur into haze. ‘Walk of Fame’, with its ironic lyric “Every day, every night, it’s all the same,” is an oh-so-familiar synth-thumping disco-pop track. Its synths fade too readily into the Flaming Lips-style psychedelia of ‘Pretend You’re God’. It feels like some of these tracks exist to support the companion film premiering at Tribeca Film Festival.
Still, while Something Beautiful lacks a standout track like ‘Flowers’ or ‘Wrecking Ball’, it’s not that kind of album. It’s not built for radio — it’s built for immersion.
Immersion doesn’t mean abandoning humour, however. ‘Every Girl You’ve Ever Loved’ brings forth 1980s sax solos, a stomping Pet Shop Boys-inspired beat, and a cameo from Naomi Campbell. It’s a sonically camp catwalk stomp that twirls to a Vogue-esque conclusion. The track also includes a section that sounds like Nino Rota’s theme to Zeferelli’s Romeo and Juliet. Even the most avant-garde of tracks find space for beauty.
Cyrus has said she wanted this record to reflect “the beauty in the nastiest parts of our lives.” It’s an ambitious aim, and for the most part, she pulls it off. There’s no tidy resolution or no final anthem. The journey concludes with the simplistic ‘Give Me Love’ which paints fantasy imagery over soaring strings and angelic backing vocals and feels like the cinematic conclusion to a surreal 1960s movie.
Something Beautiful leaves you with a feeling — elegiac, unsettled, weirdly hopeful. In many ways, The Wall comparison is unhelpful. While never truly becoming the concept album Cyrus alluded to, it is a record where the soundscape drives the narrative as much as the lyrics. It plays like a surrealist scrapbook: part memory collage, part sonic dreamscape. Musically, it refuses to settle, as the album stitches together dreamy synths, kitsch disco, future-pop, and psychedelic passages. Something Beautiful isn’t easy to categorise — and that’s exactly the point. It’s a mirrorball shattered on the floor, each piece catching a different glint of light.
Cyrus reminds us that not everything in the world has to make sense. Sometimes, just finding beauty is enough.
Words by Andrew Butcher
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