In some ways, Miley Cyrus sees her boundary-breaking discography as nothing more than "white noise."
"White noise is essentially everything happening all at the same time," she recently told Zane Lowe for Apple Music 1. "And I feel like that was what the last 20 years of my career felt like. Every time I went on stage, I kind of was retriggered with that: that this is all that it is."
It's a surprising admission for a global superstar known for her ability to conquer any genre she sets her sights on — from chart-topping pop to Americana to glam rock and beyond.
Now, she's on the cusp of releasing her ninth studio album, Something Beautiful, which arrives May 30 alongside a musical film that gives each of the LP's 13 songs its own cinematic video treatment. Coming off the GRAMMY-winning pop of her 2023 album, Endless Summer Vacation, the new visual album cuts through that "white noise" to give Cyrus a newfound appreciation for the many, many musical lives she's lived over the last two decades at the center of the cultural zeitgeist.
"By going and extracting each individual frequency and falling in love with the individual sounds, [and] putting them all together, I've found a new love for all of my songs, all of my albums, all of my performances, all the versions of me, all the eras," she said of creating the sonic landscape for Something Beautiful. "But I needed to extract each one and look at them as individual identities."
From her roots as a Disney Channel idol and the pearl-clutching pop of Bangerz to the hard-hitting glam rock of Plastic Hearts and the universal message of "Flowers," look back on how Miley Cyrus' one-of-a-kind voice has evolved over 20 years in the spotlight.
The Teen Idol
Arriving at the apex of the network's golden age in the mid-2000s, Cyrus first lit up the screen as Hannah Montana on the Disney Channel. And thanks to the House of Mouse's synergistic, star-making partnership with Hollywood Records, the teen sensation got the best of both worlds: playing a fictional pop star on the show while simultaneously launching her own music career.
Cyrus began establishing her identity separate from Hannah Montana with the release of 2007's dual soundtrack Hannah Montana 2: Meet Miley Cyrus, which gave her a chance to shake off her character's famous blonde wig and shine on spunky singles like "See You Again" and "Start All Over."
She continued to break out as a certifiable pop star in her own right thanks to Top 10 singles like "7 Things," a crunchy adolescent kiss-off rumored to be about her breakup with fellow Disney Channel talent Nick Jonas, and "The Climb," the inspiring, radio-friendly ballad that anchored her leap to the big screen in 2009's Hannah Montana: The Movie.
However, the biggest hit of Cyrus' early career was easily "Party in the U.S.A." The gleeful pop banger about a girl who "hopped off the plane at LAX with a dream and [her] cardigan" rocketed all the way to No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100, while becoming the unofficial honorary national anthem of millennials everywhere.
Like the Britneys and Christinas that came before her, Cyrus experienced her own share of growing pains as she made the leap to adulthood. On the brink of turning 18, she released 2010's Can't Be Tamed, her final album under Hollywood Records and Disney's ever-watchful eye. The stomping title track, which served as its biggest single, unequivocally signaled the singer's desire to push the boundaries and break away from the family-friendly image she'd cultivated in her rise to fame.
However, that project's flirtation with a more adult, dance-pop-oriented sound was practically child's play compared to the ways Miley would completely reinvent herself with Bangerz. By the time she released lead single "We Can't Stop" in the summer of 2013, she was a pop star reborn, sporting a two-tone pixie cut and singing about dancing, experimenting with party drugs and doing whatever the hell she wanted over blurry synths and hollowed out beats.
The hedonistic anthem not only became an instant contender for song of the summer, it also launched a series of iconic moments that would eventually define the early part of the decade and remain forever imprinted on the minds of the superstar's fans: Miley swinging completely naked in the "Wrecking Ball" music video, seductively licking a sledgehammer, riding a giant inflatable hot dog on the Bangerz Tour, and, perhaps most memorably, twerking on Robin Thicke with her tongue out at the 2013 MTV VMAs.
Once Bangerz had twerked its way to the top of the charts (and what felt like the very epicenter of cultural discourse at the time), Cyrus decided to venture even further from her teen pop beginnings — whether that meant spitting verses on hip-hop bangers like Mike WiLL Made-It's "23" and will.i.am's "Feeling Myself" or indulging in the offbeat psych-pop of Miley Cyrus and Her Dead Petz, which was so experimental that she initially released it independently in 2015.
Every rebellious phase eventually comes to an end, and by the time Cyrus came down from the party-ready high that started with the Bangerz era, she was ready to explore a softer, more timeless side to her music.
Her sixth album, 2017's Younger Now, traded sexually charged dance floors for folksy, confessional country-pop and tender balladry. The glowing guitars of lead single "Malibu" felt like a warm hug compared to the pounding, four-on-the-floor beats that had defined Bangerz, and even Miley herself seemed in awe of the transformation: "I never would've believed you/ If three years ago you'd told me I'd be here/ Writing this song/ But here I am," she sang.
Cyrus's sonic swerve toward the heartland also had an ironic way of validating that her preceding provocative pop wasn't simply some act of bratty insolence. Instead, it established the groundwork for a cycle of constant musical evolution. Each era was not only deliberate, but part of a larger whole proving that Miley couldn't be confined to just one style.
"I feel less like I have anything to prove. I think when you are a teenager [or] young adult, you're trying so hard to be cool or to prove something to be something away from who you've been as a kid," she told NPR Music at the time. "And I guess as I've gotten older — what Younger Now says is, even though it's not who I am, I'm not afraid of who I used to be."
As the 2010s gave way to a new decade, Cyrus was back to playing provocateur. First there was her 2019 EP SHE IS COMING. With the explicitly political message of its feminist lead single, "Mother's Daughter," and collaborations with RuPaul (the deliriously fun "Cattitude") and Bangerz producer Mike WiLL Made-It and Swae Lee ("Party Up The Street"), the project was originally intended to be the first of three EPs making up the LP She Is Miley Cyrus. However, that declaratively titled full-length never came to fruition.
Instead, the singer dove headfirst into the glam rock of the 1970s and '80s with her 2020 album, Plastic Hearts. Kicking things off with blistering opener "WTF Do I Know," Miley wailed, strutted and growled her way through a veritable rock resurrection on highlights like lead single "Midnight Sky," "Plastic Hearts" and "Angels Like You."
The thrilling studio set came complete with high-profile collaborations with the likes of Billy Idol ("Night Crawling"), Joan Jett ("Bad Karma") and Stevie Nicks ("Edge of Midnight (Midnight Sky Remix)") and impressively faithful covers of gold standards like Blondie's "Heart of Glass," proving that Cyrus had not only earned approval from rock music's greats but possessed the bonafides herself. At the time, The New York Times even declared, "Maybe rock's not dead — it's just in the capable hands of Miley Cyrus."
The Assured Artist
Cyrus was still finding new ways to grow when she released a little ditty called "Flowers" at the start of 2023. With its empowering message and slightly funky groove, the self-love anthem positively exploded to become the biggest hit of the star's career.
Not only did the lead single to the pop-driven Endless Summer Vacation run away with all kinds of streaming records and top charts around the globe, it also turned Miley into a GRAMMY winner when she jubilantly took home the trophies for Record Of The Year and Best Pop Solo Performance at the 2024 ceremony (and celebrated with an unforgettably giddy performance).
Elsewhere on the album, the superstar showed off an impressive range of versatility, whether she was powering through the gleaming "Jaded," duetting with Brandi Carlile on the Americana-laced "Thousand Miles" or reflecting on the ways she'd grown up from her wild post-Disney days with the soaring, sentimental ballad "Used to Be Young."
While Endless Summer Vacation displayed effortless confidence, the massive response to "Flowers" helped Cyrus become even more ambitious in her songcraft. "Receiving that GRAMMY for 'Flowers,' it felt more like a band-aid on a broken heart in some way," she said in her interview with Zane Lowe. "And so once I received my GRAMMY, I was like, 'Look, when you Google me, it says Miley Cyrus, a GRAMMY Award-winning artist. I'm gonna go make some of my weird s— that I like to make.'"
The result is the unbridled, surrealist maximalism found on Something Beautiful, whether she's mining shoegaze and jazz influences on shimmering lead single "End of the World," delivering equal doses of glamour and vulnerability on showgirl-inspired ballad "More to Lose," or recruiting supermodel Naomi Campbell for late stage standout "Every Girl You've Ever Loved."
As she told Lowe, Cyrus saw Something Beautiful as "experimental," but more importantly, "the album that I've really been craving my whole adult career to create." And according to the high-minded mission statement she wrote at the beginning of its creation, the avant garde studio set serves as the culmination of everything that came before it.
"'Something Beautiful is a love song dedicated to life, to death, to nature, to humanity, to mystery, to God, to everyone I know, to everyone I'll never know, to what I understand and what I could never fathom, to the cosmos, to this earth. It's a concept album that's an attempt to medicate a sick culture through music, hiding the healing in an entertaining work of art, bringing the divine into the day-to-day.'"