‘Bad Karma’, featuring rock icon Joan Jett, is propelled by a percussive sequence of suggestive groans and as they belt out one hell of a chorus. “I just need a lover,” she snarls atop the sort of brutally pulsing bassline that recalls Nine Inch Nails – ”So give me what I want / Or I’ll give it to myself”. The singer is equally energised on the Dua Lipa-featuring ‘Prisoner’, as they meld the neo-disco of Lipa’s recent album ‘Future Nostalgia’ with Cyrus’ glam-rock tendencies, while also incorporating snippets of Olivia Newton-John’s 1981 track ‘Physical’.Ĭharged with an industrial undercurrent, ’Gimme What I Want’ also showcases a side of Cyrus that was previously only evident in her many, well-received rock covers. “ See my lips on her mouth / Everybody’s talking now, baby” she sings gleefully. The record’s standout ‘Midnight Sky’, a recent single, thumps with ‘80s synth-rock panache Cyrus’ gravelly vocal performance is the best of her career, and reminiscent of an especially rough-hewn Steve Nicks (who was sampled on the remix ‘Edge Of Midnight’, which mashed up the track with her 1982 hit ‘Edge Of Seventeen’). Fortunately, ‘Plastic Hearts’ possesses infinitely more grit – and, crucially, a freewheeling sense of fun.
While 2017 album ‘Younger Now’ found her heading out with a similar mission in mind, the brief didn’t quite come to fruition there was newfound maturity on show, but not as much country-and-Western swagger. With album seven, Miley Cyrus attempts to meld together her innate knack for truly enormous pop bangers (see: ‘Wrecking Ball’, Party in the U.S.A’, ‘We Can’t Stop’) together with a love of rock’n’roll and country music, which has thus far not been hugely evident on her previous releases. Earlier this week, Cyrus told Zane Lowe in an Apple Music interview: “The last three years, I called the cocktail of chaos, because just felt like the worst bartender ever… just kept pouring this shit… and you’re dizzy off it”.
She also announced – and later scrapped – a trilogy of EPs, originally supposed to culminate in a new album called ‘She Is Miley Cyrus’. This disaster was the first of a chain of events which saw Cyrus’ life upended in a number of ways she subsequently married and then split from actor Liam Hemsworth and played a career-defining set at Glastonbury, head-banging to Metallica and Led Zeppelin atop a giant speaker-stack on the Pyramid stage. When they filmed her fictional escape from polished chart-pop, Cyrus had just learned she had lost her Malibu home to the 2018 California wildfire, along with every songwriting journal she owns.
#PLASTIC HEARTS FREE#
In that Black Mirror episode (spoiler alert) Ashley O breaks free and becomes a thrashing rock star. “There were some obvious similarities the character that I’ve played before that actually really became my life,” she told Variety earlier this year.
It has led her in multiple different directions: from the provocative garishness of 2013 album ‘Bangerz’ to vaguely psychedelic pop with The Flaming Lips (they formed the band Miley Cyrus & Her Dead Petz). Since then – she retired the character in 2011 – the singer has spent much time trying to escape this clean-cut Disney narrative. Cyrus began her career by playing fictional teen pop star Hannah Montana. Though Cyrus’ own journey is far less drastic, her story still shares a few parallels. Read more: Rocking ball: why ultimate badass Miley Cyrus is the rock star we need in 2020 When the real Ashley begins rebelling and writing increasingly dark and experimental material, her management puts her into a coma and wheels out a replacement hologram to perform instead – her biggest song, ‘On A Roll’, is a watered-down bubblegum-flavoured version of Nine Inch Nails ‘Head Like a Hole’. Last year Miley Cyrus starred in an episode of Black Mirror as Ashley O, a carbon-copy pop star forced to pump out hit after saccharine hit.
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