In 2015, Miley Cyrus dropped Bangerz, her post-Disney-debut album that featured tracks “We Can’t Stop” and “Wrecking Ball.” That record was followed by Miley Cyrus And Her Dead Petz, free-download surprise-release album largely recorded with the Flaming Lips. At the beginning of 2023, Cyrus returned with the massively popular “Flowers” and Endless Summer Vacation, the album that turned her into GRAMMY Award winner. Stereogum reports that Cyrus is once again ready to lean into the trippy zone, making a Pink Floyd-inspired visual LP with the director of Mandy.
Miley Cyrus is the subject of a new Harper’s Bazaar profile that mostly focuses on her successful transition from child star to permanently-famous pop culture icon. The story includes fascinating details about Cyrus’ upcoming plans. According to Harper’s Bazaar, Cyrus is working on a new album called Something Beautiful. Her main collaborator seems to be her boyfriend, 26-year-old Maxx Morando. Morando is in the band Liily and Cyrus says that he is always playing her “the coolest kid in Brooklyn’s music” and that he “just inspires me so much.” According to the article, Morando co-wrote the new album’s title track and produced multiple songs.
One of Cyrus’ main inspirations for the new album is Pink Floyd’s The Wall – both the 1979 blockbuster album and the surreal 1982 Alan Parker rock-opera film. Cyrus had a formative experience getting high with her friends and watching that film as a teenager, and she says “My idea was making The Wall, but with a better wardrobe and more glamorous and filled with pop culture.”
Another reference point is Mandy, the art-damaged 2018 horror-revenge film. Cyrus tells Harper’s Bazaar that she played with the idea of adapting Mandy as a musical: “I wanted to play Nicolas Cage. I love that it’s a romance revenge story. Romance and revenge – those are some of the greatest tragedies. I forever and always will be interested in those.”
When considering the idea, Cyrus contacted Mandy director Panos Cosmatos. Profile writer Izzy Grinspan writes that while Cosmatos did not assist in creating the album, he “is now heavily involved in the new album, which is as much visual as it is musical.” Cosmatos describes the record as being “more experimental than anything she’s ever done, but in a pop way that I love.”
Cyrus says that Something Beautiful sounds “hypnotizing and glamorous,” and she continues to say: “It’s a concept album that’s an attempt to medicate somewhat of a sick culture through music… I would like to be a human psychedelic for people. I don’t want anyone trying to be like me or imitate me or even be inspired by me. I want to impact frequencies in your body that make you vibrate at a different level…
“The visual component of this is driving the sound. It was important for me that every song has these healing sound properties. The songs, whether they’re about destruction or heartbreak or death, they’re presented in a way that is beautiful, because the nastiest times of our life do have a point of beauty. They are the shadow, they are the charcoal, they are the shading. You can’t have a painting without highlights and contrast.” Read the full article here.
Miley Cyrus has been making headlines for the last couple of months with her ongoing legal dispute over the track “Flowers” for “lyrical similarity” to Bruno Mars’ “When I Was Your Man.” Cyrus has claimed the case has “fatal flaw” and is seeking to dismiss the case.
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