Did you see Miley Cyrus in that bad but entertaining chapter of Black Mirror? It's a story with many thickly drawn allegories of Britney's labyrinth dramas, Miley's own career, and her days as a Disney princess. It came out a couple of years ago, so it shouldn't count as a spoiler: Miley plays Ashley O, a hyper-marketed popstar. Her owners keep her at bay by secretly drugging her and preventing her from expressing herself outside of the machinery created around her. After several adventures, Ashley dodges her fate as a servile hologram. The final scene of the episode is with her free and happy doing what she wants: singing "Head Like a Hole", by Nine Inch Nails, in a den full of crests and rocker fists. Fans from her pre-made popstar days run away in horror as she floats ecstatically over the mosh.
God knows Miley has done things to escape Hannah Montana, but Plastic Hearts should have the reverse effect of Ashley O's reinvention in Black Mirror. The big surprise of the seventh! Miley Cyrus's album is that it vibrates both in the frequency of her idols from the 80s who appear as guests (Joan Jett, Billy Idol, Stevie Nicks) and in that of the teen pop rock of her first solo albums, when she was still wearing the wig to Disney Channel listening to the pink pop rock of Lindsay Lohan, Ashlee Simpson and Hilary Duff. On the cover, she looks defiant, with her mullet, her chains, her leather gloves and studs, and her very Plot T-shirt with the word “CENSORSHIP”. Plastic Miley. On the album, she is heard as a glam rock goddess in an absolute state of grace, as if she was born for this sound and time has given her voice the authority to make it her little whore. Miley heart.
Precocious as always, at the age of 28 Miley Cyrus already has a divorce record. On “WTF Do I Know,” the opening track, it sounds like Pat Benatar has met The Hives. She removes some dirty laundry from her ex-husband's bleeding nose, but begins to outline something that runs throughout the album: for her a conventional relationship is a form of oppression similar to that of fame, and she goes on to say that she is not going to let herself be devoured by neither. “What the hell do I know. I'm alone because I couldn't be someone's hero. Do you want an apology? From me not."
It's fun to see how in recent months Miley Cyrus put the rock audience in the pocket: covers of songs like “Heart of Glass” by Blondie and “Zombie” by Cranberries -which appear here as bonus tracks-, reminded or let them know what she can do with her roar and overwhelming presence. This resource is not new for Miley, but it is effective (we will have to see how they react when their album of Metallica covers comes out).
At the same time, he runs the risk of falling into nostalgia for the genre, or worse, mimicry. Plastic Hearts was produced mainly by Andrew Watt, in charge of the last one by Ozzy Osbourne but also “Señorita” by Camila Cabello and the cover of “Doin 'Time” by Lana del Rey. The album balances on this slippery ground, with percussion quotes from "Sympathy for the Devil" in the title track, a nod to "Physical" by Olivia Newton-John in the duet with Dua Lipa "Prisoner", and more of a similarity to the industrial beat of "Closer" by Nine Inch Nails on "Gimme What I Want." Perhaps a weak point of the album is in the collaborations: Billy Idol in "Night Crawling" and Joan Jett in "Bad Karma" are only to allude to hits and specific sounds from their respective careers that Miley wanted for herself. Luckily the songs are good enough and on “Bad Karma” Angel Olsen plays (that feat would be interesting!).
Everything has a pop immediacy from which Miley had been escaping. After the hip hop and country hybrid that was Bangerz ( 2013 ), he followed up with a kamikaze experiment with Wayne Coyne Miley Cyrus & Her Dead Petz - highly underrated - and had a contemplative country pop detox with Younger Now . From then on, things got more confusing. In 2019, a trilogy of EPs with She Is Coming began, which was aborted, partly due to a fire that took some recordings, and partly because Miley was already changing her skin again.
Miley Cyrus 2020 appeared with a disco / new wave sound: “Midnight Sky” is practically an update on “Edge of Seventeen” and it fits her perfectly. The album also includes a mash up of the two songs sung in duet with Stevie Nicks: "I was born to run, I don't belong to anyone, I don't need to be loved by you. It is an already traditional proclamation for Miley, who has been repeating from pre- Bangerz songs such as "Can't Be Tamed" and "Liberty Walk", but now what she says has the weight of life experience.
Miley Cyrus makes a spiritual account of the future of this wild decade in the official closing of the album, “Golden G String” (“Golden Thong”), a dreampop ballad in which she looks at her contradictions, her exhibitionism, her feminism and her self-exploitation in front of the media. “Yes, I wore the gold thong. I put my hand in hell fire. I did everything to make them love me and feel alive, ”she sings, rocking over a synthesized bass. "I was trying to appropriate my power, I am still trying. It sounds like you don't agree with everything you did, but you don't regret anything, like a good rebel. “You dare to call me crazy, did you see what this place is? I should get out of here. But I think I'm going to stay.