Miley Cyrus - Bass Persuades Review

The flashes of darkness and experimentation on Bass Persuades only make Miley’s frustrating retreat into safer territory harder to understand.

Miley Cyrus, now going simply by Miley, has returned surprisingly quickly with Bass Persuades, arriving only a year after Something Beautiful. That album was the most fully realised project of Miley Cyrus’ career: genuinely ambitious, packed with brilliantly crafted songs and, crucially, a great start-to-finish listen as an album. Naturally, the prospect of more music so soon was exciting. Sadly, there is nothing particularly beautiful about Bass Persuades.

Where Something Beautiful felt like a real artistic effort for Miley, Bass Persuades feels rushed and strangely uninspired by comparison. There are definite highlights, and ‘Different Religion’, featuring Model/Actriz, is immediately one of them. Moody, sinister and brilliantly produced, there’s a slight horror to its instrumentation that suits Miley incredibly well. It’s exactly the kind of territory that seemed ripe for further exploration after Something Beautiful. The frustrating thing about collaborations like this, though, is that Miley enters Model/Actriz’s world without seeming to absorb enough of it. Imagine if that delicious, grubby, industrial atmosphere had infected the rest of the record.

Instead, ‘Let’s Get Married’ immediately follows, and the shift is jarring. Its soft-rock Fleetwood Mac energy is pleasant enough, but lyrically it feels miles away from emotionally gutting Something Beautiful highlights like ‘More to Lose’. Some of the writing veers into cringe territory, and the song ultimately feels like a paint-by-numbers ballad performed by someone capable of considerably more. Miley has one of the great voices of her generation, probably the closest thing modern pop has to Stevie Nicks, and that’s what makes songs like this particularly frustrating. She has an instrument that can make almost anything sound enormous. The lyrics and music around it need to be just as interesting.

‘Orbit’ fares better. A more thoughtful piano ballad, there’s something appropriately weightless about the music underneath it, while ‘whenever you’re around / I want to orbit you’ is simple but feels truthful. Love and devotion run throughout Bass Persuades, but there’s a thin line here between sincerity and corniness. ‘Orbit’ lands on the right side of it because Miley sounds like she believes every word.

That unevenness becomes the defining problem with the album. Something Beautiful moved between styles too, but its versatility felt purposeful. Here, Miley doesn’t seem entirely sure which direction she wants to take. The album begins with the suggestion that this might be a dark, strange dance record, then quickly settles into a run of softer ballads before periodically remembering the nastier record it could have been. Considering Shawn Everett and Dave Fridmann are involved in the mixing, two producers known for records with huge, distinctive sonic identities, it’s surprising how often Bass Persuades plays things safe. Miley has always been at her best when she’s being weird.

‘Aftermath’ is a particularly awkward example of the record trying to have things both ways. Underneath, it feels like another ballad, but thumping percussion and dance production have been piled around it without really benefiting the song. The beat is hectic where the writing wants room to breathe. It feels caught between two versions of itself.

‘REDLIGHTS’ is considerably stronger. Miley sounds fantastic as the chorus opens up around ‘when I’m soaring through the sky / I won’t fear anything’, while bubbling synths, strings and little Spanish guitar inflections give the arrangement far more character. Its language is almost devotional: ‘surrender lovingly and disappear into the night’, followed eventually by ‘anywhere you go I will also go’. Across the album, love seems to involve surrendering yourself completely to another person.

‘Neon Signs’, featuring Andrew Wyatt of Miike Snow, is similarly uneven but difficult to dislike. Wyatt and Miley singing together on the chorus works beautifully, and ‘I may not be your guy / but I could be your late night company’ is genuinely sweet. Then somebody actually says ‘neon signs’ and you start wondering whether ChatGPT was briefly invited into the writing session. Still, the chorus melody sounds gorgeous.

Then ‘Innocent Ways’ arrives and, finally, we’re talking. The darkness of ‘Different Religion’ suddenly returns. Its verse is dirty, bassy and full of life, immediately raising the question of where this version of Bass Persuades has been for the last five tracks. It sounds like Miley trying to soundtrack the Zion rave in The Matrix Reloaded, hundreds of sweaty humans dancing underground while the machines prepare to wipe them out. This is where Miley sounds most exciting: physical, strange, slightly sleazy and completely committed. The problem is that by the time Bass Persuades gets back here, it almost feels too late. There was a brilliant nine-track dark, brooding Miley dance record waiting to be made somewhere inside this album.

Final track ‘Snow’ returns to ballad territory, but this time it works. The imagery of snow falling and melting gives the song’s relationship a built-in impermanence, while ‘together we both fall’ turns that image into something strangely romantic. Miley’s performance feels authentic and unforced, and the song gradually expands towards a genuinely great climax, driven by a penetrating synth bass underneath her vocal. It’s one of the record’s strongest slower moments because the production finally gives her voice something substantial to push against.

Miley’s voice remains undeniably extraordinary and, when everything aligns, her music can contain some of the best pop songwriting around. That makes Bass Persuades more frustrating than a straightforwardly bad Miley album would be. Something Beautiful felt like an artist finally coming into her own, an ambitious record that actually succeeded in most of what it attempted. Even its biggest weakness was essentially a request for more: go weirder, noisier, darker, push it further. Bass Persuades occasionally does exactly that, which makes it all the more baffling when it pulls away again.

You can still hear the aftermath of Something Beautiful throughout this record. That album clearly wasn’t a one-off experiment, and moments of its adventurousness survive here, particularly on ‘Different Religion’ and ‘Innocent Ways’. But Bass Persuades ultimately feels like a watered-down continuation instead of the next step. It’s disjointed and unsure what it wants to be, with some genuinely strong songs surrounded by material that doesn’t push Miley anywhere near hard enough. How can ‘Different Religion’, a song that makes Miley sound dangerous, sit next to ‘Let’s Get Married’, which makes one of pop’s most distinctive singers sound strangely boring?

That inconsistency is ultimately what sinks Bass Persuades. The good songs don’t prove the album works. They make the record it could have been frustratingly easy to imagine. Somewhere in here is a dark, industrial Miley dance album, and nine tracks in that sweaty underground club would have made for a far more compelling record.