In August of this year, she released “Midnight Sky,” a cocaine-dusted disco track that addressed her divorce and subsequent high-profile flings in a surprisingly mature way. In the wake of the split, Cyrus reset, scrapping her two unreleased EPs and pursuing a darker, classic rock-indebted sound.
Both projects were relative commercial failures, attempts at image rehabilitation that instead removed a once-inescapable star from the conversation entirely.īefore Cyrus could release the sequels to She Is Coming, her life was upended, the vast majority of her new album destroyed in the Woolsey wildfire, and her decade-long relationship with actor Liam Hemsworth ending in a messy, highly-publicized divorce. In 2017, she pivoted to back-to-basics country-pop with the painfully dull Younger Now, before, with little explanation or contrition, returning to the rap sound that had defined her Bangerz era on the 2019 EP She Is Coming, the first installment of a planned trilogy that replaced the former record’s freewheeling joy with a cursory nod to GothBoiClique-style emo rap and a typically inane guest verse from RuPaul. In the years since, Cyrus has attempted to outrun that glittery, twerk-heavy chapter of her career. Focus exclusively on the drama and it’d be easy to forget that the three-year period of Cyrus’ output that yielded 2013’s Mike WiLL Made-It-produced Bangerz and 2015’s Flaming Lips collaboration Miley Cyrus and Her Dead Petz was one of the most intriguingly bizarre pop eras of the past decade, throwing a spanner into a fairly staid, Max Martin-run commercial landscape and making discourse around thoughtless co-opting of Black art accessible and understandable to a new generation of pop fans.
Although Cyrus’ various musical projects have rarely been good, a few have been, at the very least, historically significant.
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