Despite the fact that it was exactly the type of middling, unmemorable pop song that frustrates me more than it should, I was glad to see Miley Cyrus finally receive her flowers from the Grammys for "Flowers." Like many uncool people my age, there was a time growing up that I consumed a steady diet of Hannah Montana (and its iconic oft-memed nonsense vocable scene transitions) and was willing to do just about anything to convince my parents to let me get hair extensions so I could look like her.
Part of the appeal of Cyrus that has become more and more apparent over the years is how increasingly willing she's been to embrace her weirdness. In 2013, she pretty successfully picked up where 2010's really-not-that-wild Can't Be Tamed left off, cutting her coveted long locks into a bleached fauxhawk and twerking on Robin Thicke with a foam finger before releasing Bangerz — an uneven album, to be sure, but one with some bona fide hits.
In 2015, she entered her Grateful Dead era with the Flaming Lips-assisted surprise Soundcloud release, Miley Cyrus & Her Dead Petz. 2017's Younger Now had something going with the saccharine single "Malibu" before the rest of the quote-unquote "country" record failed to make an impact, while 2020's Plastic Hearts coasted on the inevitable radio success of interpolating a Stevie Nicks classic.
Even compared to the strangest moments in her truly multifaceted catalogue to date, the lead-up to Something Beautiful made the album sound particularly experimental, with the singer-songwriter being quoted as citing Pink Floyd's The Wall and Nicolas Cage's Mandy as her primary influences for the visual accompaniment.
The closest the record gets to the former is on its title track, which gives way from lounge-y jazz bar vibes to roaring distortion just before the minute-and-a-half mark. Horns continue artfully squelching away in the background — and do so again after a verse return to the original feel before the song ends following a bombastic wall-of-sound crescendo.
On "Something Beautiful," Cyrus sounds great. The rasp in her voice has always been so idiosyncratic and charming, and the title track sees her really flex her range. "You're marking up my necklace," she whisper-sings in the pre-chorus, waiting for the final syllable to drip like honey. It all amounts to a promising start for the record — a promise that, unfortunately, turns up empty.
For all its merits, "Something Beautiful" does feel introductory with its incessant building, which ultimately ends up fading out in the cacophony and distortion. The quality of the songs that follow doesn't do it justice, and they make it clear that extravagant orchestral arrangements and big, shiny disco four-on-the-floors don't a "pop opera" make.
Something Beautiful does, of course, sound beautiful — Shawn Everett's production is widescreen and larger than life, but still remembers to dial things back when needed, although maybe not always quite enough (Cyrus is an impressive balladeer! "The Climb" was a moment!) — but it also rings hollow. Its prettiness feels as superficial as the pseudo-empowerment sentiment of "Flowers."
Much like the clusterfuck of fascinating guest contributors (Alvvays? Flea? Joseph Shabason? Marie Davidson? Naomi Campbell? And that's just "Every Girl You've Ever Loved"!), Something Beautiful holistically feels like a fever dream, but not in the way that I think Cyrus was going for. You've awoken in a strange place and are not sure how you got there, having just listened to this 52-minute album. Dizzy on the comedown, you're unable to remember a single lyrical platitude or recycled melody — and not from the sheer impact of the artistic force of the experience, but from the lack of any footholds to make sense of it.
In a recent interview with The New York Times, Cyrus opened up about her life-changing experience in EMDR therapy, which helped her get over debilitating stage fright. She described being prompted to picture herself on a train, watching her life pass out the window like a movie in her mind. She said that it helped her discover that the root of her anxiety about performing live could be traced back generationally to her mom, who was adopted, and wanting to feel deeply loved and chosen by the audience in a way her mother lacked from her birth parents.
It's clear that Cyrus tried to reference this experience in the album's spoken-word introduction, "Prelude," which literally opens with the line, "Like when following an image from a train / Your eyes can't keep the passing landscapes / From being swallowed by distance." Hearing this in the context of that interview does even more work, setting the scene for something revelatory, but the album is nowhere near as moving to experience as a three-minute clip of that interview shared to TikTok.
Something Beautiful is all style and no substance — and that's not to say there isn't a place for that in pop music, especially when the style is this well-versed in '80s subgenres, as well as balancing both analogue and digital vitality. With an auteur as captivating as Cyrus has shown that she can be at the helm, the pursuit of aesthetics alone just feels like lowballing.