In the power ballad department, Cyrus fares better with the country- and gospel-inflected “High,” a close cousin to the material her kindred spirit and fellow Lips collaborator Kesha has been kicking out in recent years. One exception is early misfire “Angels Like You” - backing its acoustic chords with booming digital drums, it’s like a drippy OneRepublic attempt at a Guns N’ Roses slow jam. Similarly, the Dua Lipa duet “Prisoner” ably merges rock and disco like something off Thriller while seemingly borrowing the cadence from Olivia Newton-John’s “ Physical.” (This will surely confuse less attentive pop fans since Lipa used that track’s “Let’s get physical!” refrain for her own retro hit single this year.) The Billy Idol collab “Night Crawling” segues from crashing power chords to an immaculate era-appropriate synth hook, while pleasingly quirky vocal ad libs add flavor to what could have been a rote Joan Jett tribute in “Bad Karma.”Īs Plastic Hearts wears on, it veers away from that crisp, hard-hitting retro sound more and more often, but the songwriting mostly remains strong. “Midnight Sky” presents a similar mixture of unbound passion and wistful reverie as it surges along the borderline between dance-pop and arena-rock. “Keep me up all night/ Keep me up all night.” As the refrain progresses, she eases into a subtler tone, lamenting with deep pathos, “I just want to feel something, but I keep feelin’ nothin’ all night long.” It’s a masterclass vocal performance on one of the best pop-leaning rock songs of 2020.Īlthough the album peaks there, Cyrus delivers quite a few more winsome pastiches before all is said and done. The chorus is a monster: “I’ve been California dreamin’/ Plastic hearts are bleedin’!” Cyrus howls, showing off the texture in her powerhouse voice. “Plastic Hearts” is even better building from “Sympathy For The Devil” bongos to a finger-snapping, head-bobbing, body-bouncing backbeat, it packs several of the album’s best hooks into one song. “WTF Do I Know” comes charging out of the gate at full speed, guitars shredding and F-bombs flying, like early Paramore trying their hand at hair metal. This is particularly true of the first few tracks, which function both as gleaming pop music and hard-hitting rock songs. And although the branding is doing a lot of work to frame this diverse collection of music a certain way, Plastic Hearts rocks out quite a bit under its pristine sheen. Recent live covers of that band’s “Heart Of Glass” and the Cranberries’ “Zombie” are also tacked onto the end. Stevie Nicks shows up on a digital bonus track to blend her own “Edge Of Seventeen” with lead single “Midnight Sky,” itself a shimmering current of twitchy “Eye Of The Tiger” guitar, feverish low-end synth ripples, and Blondie’s disco-inflected new wave swagger. She’s telegraphed her intentions with glammed-out punk-rock photo shoots and a guest list that includes Joan Jett, Billy Idol, and Dua Lipa, whose own current album cycle mines the neon imagery of the ’70s and ’80s. This time around, Cyrus has styled herself as a Pat Benatar figure, an ’80s rock star on the precipice of pop. But if Plastic Hearts feels more like a product than a work of art, it’s a product Cyrus sounds fully invested in, one filled out with her best collection of songs to date. She once again worked with a whole host of industry songwriters and producers, among them Ryan Tedder, Ali Tamposi, Watt, Louis Bell, Andrew Wyatt, and Mark Ronson. The album is as much a meticulous exercise in image-crafting as the tongue-wagging, molly-addled Bangerz or 2017’s tepid and instantly forgettable Younger Now, on which she attempted to rebrand as a rootsy adult contemporary artist. With Plastic Hearts, released over Thanksgiving weekend, Cyrus has finally let herself embrace rock music as more than an extracurricular pursuit. Last year, after reportedly stealing the show at a star-studded Chris Cornell tribute, she starred in a Black Mirror episode about a singer who breaks free from manufactured pop stardom and forms a rock band instead - a little on-the-nose, don’t you think? In her Backyard Sessions series, she has consistently delivered gritty acoustic takes on classic songs, like a run through the Replacements’ “Androgynous” joined by Joan Jett and Laura Jane Grace. In 2015 the former child star pivoted from the druggy trap-pop of Bangerz to Flaming Lips-assisted psychedelia with Miley Cyrus And Her Dead Petz, a pointedly weird album that, if not exactly devil-horn-throwing rock ‘n’ roll, at least stepped her into the rock milieu. For a long time now, Miley Cyrus has seemed like she just wants to rock.
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