SOMETHING BEAUTIFUL Miley Cyrus
The Big Issue Australia
Issue #73920 June 2025
By Olivia J. Bennett
Miley Cyrus drops us into a sci-fi dreamworld with her latest album. It opens on ‘Prelude', all orchestral swell and sleazy sax, as she delivers a breathy monologue—something between a perfume ad and a space opera: “Like walking alone through a lucid dream.” Interludes like this reappear throughout, acting like little warp jumps between genres and energies—gauzy ballads, loungey electronica, soft-rock shimmer. The strongest tracks are stacked up front, with the title track the standout, veering between R&B-tinged restraint and hard rock theatrics. The shift is extreme, almost derailing, but it gives the song a kind of unhinged passion. That alien unpredictability is what keeps the album engaging. It certainly has its bloat—some tracks blur, some gestures don’t stick—but Something Beautiful finds a steady mood: sincere without heaviness, self-aware without the wink. Not a reinvention, more a glittery relic from another dimension, beaming out pop-rock dispatches as it hurtles into the sun.