Miley Cyrus's un-listenable ‘visual' album is a waste of her fantastic voice

Telegraph

29-05-2025

A curious trend in the language used around mainstream commercial pop music suggests that nobody is content with just being perceived as a pop star any more. They are a 'visionary artist', a 'polymath', 'multi-disciplinarian' or 'a triple threat'.
According to her Wikipedia entry, Miley Cyrus is a 'singer, songwriter, actress and director', to which can now be added 'executive producer' of her 'visual album' Something Beautiful. A recent breathless piece in Harper's Bazaar proclaimed that 'when she's making music, Cyrus taps into a kind of cultural synaesthesia, pulling from fashion, film, music and art.' Or you could say that like everyone else she is influenced by stuff around her, but whatever, let's call it 'cultural synaesthesia', why not?
Cyrus revealed that her magnum opus was 'a concept album that's an attempt to medicate somewhat of a sick culture through music' inspired by Pink Floyd's The Wall with themes centred around beauty, death, heartbreak and destruction. Describing herself as 'a human psychedelic,' Cyrus proclaimed that she wants 'to impact your body at frequencies that make you vibrate.'
But does it have any good tunes? And yes, it does, thank goodness, but you have to wade through a lot of pretentious rubbish to get there. In terms of the 'visual album', from what I've seen it looks suspiciously like a series of quite basic performance videos of Cyrus miming in haute couture. But the numerous instrumental interludes are excruciating, bombastic concoctions of cheesy synth sounds and noisy effects that belong on a tired VHS of a second rate early 90s action movie.
An edge of rebelliousness has been part of Cyrus's appeal ever since the former Disney child TV star shocked America by appearing naked in the video for her breakout 'adult' pop hit Wrecking Ball in 2013. She has form in the dodgy concept department, collaborating with psychedelic indie mavericks Flaming Lips on a 2015 album about a deceased dog Miley Cyrus & Her Dead Petz. But I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that the reason people really like Cyrus is that she has a fantastic hoarse and smoky voice and can sing the heck of a good song.
Indeed, Cyrus has fronted two of the great pop hits of our times, Wrecking Ball (which had six songwriters, none of whom was Cyrus), and 2021's disco breakup anthem Flowers (on which Cyrus was one of three songwriters). Something Beautiful has three decent tracks (fizzy dance song End Of the World, emotional ballad More to Lose and the elegiac Golden Burning Sun) and one absolute monster of a sad banger, Easy Lover, that stands out like a blazing beacon amidst a parade of trite ditties overstretched far beyond their natural life to encompass banal poetic codas.
Topped off with a mushy distorted production courtesy of alt-rock stalwart Shawn Everett, I would go as far as to say Cyrus's visual album is practically unlistenable. To be fair, it did make my body vibrate, but not in a good way.