Something Beautiful is the most compelling answer yet to why Miley Cyrus decided to leave her voice damaged.
After one surgery in 2019, she stopped short of follow-up operations that could remove a polyp in her throat and help with fluid in her damaged vocal cords, a condition called Reinke’s edema. “My voice is super unique because of it,” she recently explained. “But I do have this Reinke’s edema and I have this large polyp on my cords, and I’m not willing to sever it because [of] the chance of waking up from a surgery and not sounding like myself.”
A singer’s voice is both the dancer and her stage; the message and its vessel. Cyrus’ hesitation to change her very sound is understandable. At first she embraced the rasp with the ’80s glam of Plastic Hearts in 2020. The rocking swagger sounded good on her, but even a modest run of festival dates from 2021-22 took a toll.
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2023’s Endless Summer Vacation seemed to set her up for a much more comfortable performing run. She used a cleaner vocal tone, sang in shorter phrases, and promoted singles like “Violet Chemistry” that placed few demands on her instrument. So it came as a bit of a surprise when she announced her decision to stop touring altogether.
Not that her reasons were hard to understand — the polyp, the edema, protecting her sobriety, not to mention waking up in her own house — but if Cyrus wasn’t going to tour, what was she saving her voice for? Why continue to deal with pain and vocal fry just to pad ESV with some of the easiest top lines of her career? As it turns out, she had [removing sunglasses] Something Beautiful in mind.
Cyrus’ ninth studio album is a top-to-bottom vocal showcase, with some poetry and a couple of conceptual touches that offer insight into her thinking. It’s far from perfect, but when so many pop stars of her generation have retreated back to their classic sounds, such lively flaws are easy to forgive.
“Prelude” opens the record with a spoken-word meditation on beauty and transitions tied to loss. Most of the images carry a literary loveliness, though a few are a syntactical slog (“Like when facing the sun through a window/ Your skin feels warmth/ But it can’t be in the world that its warmth has made alive”). “Prelude,” co-written with Model/Actriz’s Cole Haden, ends on a sharp idea: “The beauty one finds alone/ Is a prayer that longs to be shared.”
From there Cyrus launches into the title track: a swanky mashup of the kind of verses that made Christina Aguilera’s reputation alongside a furious beatdown of a chorus that would earn approving nods from Black Country, New Road. “Something Beautiful” is the most sonically daring track on the album, flipping back and forth between moods. But the transition to the bubblegum disco-pop of Track 3, “End of the World,” is almost more jarring.
Because as it turns out, the avant-pop touches and sultry R&B are only part of Something Beautiful. Cyrus remains besotted with good old mainstream bops, and she’s fine dropping the risky sonics and relegating her themes to the lyrics. Not that there’s anything wrong with the horny dystopia of “End of the World” or the powerhouse balladry of “More to Lose.” The latter especially shows off all the strange and wonderful vocal tones that set Cyrus apart. She’s still exploring beauty and ugliness, the madness of transitions; it’s just that for a while, the madness is more told than shown. It’s not until “Interlude 1” that the sonic ideas of the openers return, and Something Beautiful realizes its most daring ambitions
A vibraphone rings out through a fog of wind or static. A pick slides across a guitar like a knife sliding from its sheath. As strings swell and percussion emerges from the haze, Cyrus will not say a word. In this first of two instrumentals, horns herald a dance frenzy that peaks almost as soon as it began, fading away to chimes in the fog.