Miley Cyrus Bass Persuades

Tracks: Basse Persuades, Different Religion ft. Model/Actriz, Let's Get Married, Orbit, Aftermath, REDLIGHTS, Neon Signs ft. Andrew Wyatt, Innocent Ways, Snow, Bass Persaudes Remixx ft. Model/Actriz

Label: Atlantic Recording Inc.

There is something rather fitting about Bass Persuades arriving as Miley Cyrus’s tenth studio album. Ten records into a career that has already contained enough reinventions for several artists, Miley has reached a point where she no longer seems particularly interested in proving that she can become somebody else. Instead, she appears increasingly comfortable with the idea that all those previous versions of herself were always part of the same person.

The former Disney starlet is now simply Miley. And on Bass Persuades, her first album following her move to Atlantic, she offers something that feels less like another reinvention and more like a retrospective conversation with herself. Pieces of the Miley who made Can’t Be Tamed, Bangerz, Endless Summer Vacation and Something Beautiful are all here, but they have been rearranged into something calmer, older and considerably more self-assured.

This is not an album desperately chasing the next viral moment. There is no sense that Miley needs a TikTok sound, a radio smash or another piece of pop-cultural domination to justify her existence. Bass Persuades feels much more interested in the question of what Miley Cyrus actually wants to sound like now.

And, perhaps most importantly, she seems to know that there is no single answer.

I realise that not everybody has spent most of their life watching Miley grow up in public. For me, however, her career has unfolded almost in parallel with my own. Her changes have often felt strangely familiar: the teenage desire to escape expectations, the need to shock, the urge to demonstrate independence, the messiness of finding yourself, and eventually the quieter realisation that stability and self-worth can be just as liberating as rebellion.

That has always been the fascinating contradiction of Miley Cyrus.

She is one of pop's great chameleons. She has moved through country, pop-rock, hip-hop, disco, psychedelia, electronic music and arena-sized power ballads without ever seeming particularly frightened of abandoning whatever worked before. It has made her an extraordinarily versatile artist, but it has also made her difficult to place. For a listener arriving at any particular point in her career, the question has often been, 'Which Miley are we getting?'

The answer, increasingly, seems to be: all of them.

There were hints of this settling into herself on Endless Summer Vacation, before Something Beautiful pushed the idea considerably further. The latter may not have delivered the commercial impact expected of a Miley Cyrus album, but creatively it felt like a declaration of independence — a record made according to its own internal logic rather than the demands of the marketplace.

Bass Persuades feels like the next chapter rather than a continuation in the traditional sense.

It is less grandiose than Something Beautiful, less committed to a single aesthetic and considerably more interested in intimacy. Love, desire, passion, commitment and the strange comfort of finally feeling settled run through the album. There is a sense that Miley is no longer documenting the process of becoming herself. She is examining what happens after you have spent years becoming her.

That makes Bass Persuades an album of contrasts. Half of it exists in a softer, more romantic space. Let's Get Married” is almost disarmingly sweet: warm, affectionate and deliberately wedding-ready without becoming completely saccharine. Orbit is another standout, with lyrical writing and a vocal performance that recalls some of the darker, more dramatic qualities of Can't Be Tamed. It feels like an older Miley looking backwards without trying to recreate the past.

Then there is REDLIGHTS, which sits somewhere between romance and lust. Its retro sensuality and sleek dance production give it a timeless quality, with the sort of nocturnal elegance that could easily find a home alongside contemporary disco and dance-pop. Neon Signs takes that sexuality even further, becoming one of the stranger moments on the record. The production is deliberately unconventional, complete with breaths and vocal textures that could easily have become distracting, yet Miley and Andrew Wyatt manage to make the whole thing work.

Snow is another example of Miley operating within familiar territory. Its instrumentation gives it some personality, but ultimately it is a relatively safe proposition. And there is nothing inherently wrong with that. Miley has always been very good at the ballad. The problem is that when an artist has spent so much of her career taking risks, competence can occasionally feel less exciting than possibility.

The other half of Bass Persuades is where things get considerably more interesting.

The title track remains the album's clearest statement of intent, taking the sensuality and rhythmic experimentation of the record and turning it into something physical. But it is Different Religion that arguably provides the biggest surprise.

Dark, industrial and gloriously filthy, it is one of the strongest tracks in Miley's entire catalogue. The production is enormous without becoming bloated, and the contribution from Model/Actriz initially feels like it belongs to an entirely different record. Somehow, that is precisely why it works. Their voices create an uncomfortable, erotic tension that turns the track into something far more memorable than a conventional pop collaboration.

It is Miley embracing the kind of weirdness she has always been capable of but increasingly seems willing to use with purpose.

Aftermath is another energetic highlight. It is not quite as radical as Different Religion, but its unusual rhythmic structure gives the track momentum and a slightly unpredictable quality. There are echoes of Bangerz here, although the attitude feels less like provocation for provocation's sake and more like an artist revisiting an old instinct with considerably more control.

Then there is Innocent Ways, perhaps the track that best bridges the album's present and its past. Grungy, rough-edged and slightly dangerous, it fits the record's visual world beautifully while also sounding unmistakably like Miley. It is exactly the kind of song that reminds you why her refusal to settle into one genre has been so compelling in the first place.

The curious exception is Bass Persuades Remixx, which feels less essential. It is difficult to understand what it adds to the album as a complete work, particularly when the original already establishes the song's purpose. As a standalone experiment it is perfectly serviceable, but within the sequencing it interrupts rather than enhances the album's flow.

And flow is important here, because Bass Persuades is ultimately stronger as an album than as a collection of individual songs.

There is not a genuinely bad track here. What there are, however, are fewer moments of complete transcendence than on Something Beautiful. That album had a much more obvious artistic mission: every song felt as though it belonged to the same enormous world. Bass Persuades is more fragmented by design, moving between ballads, mid-tempo romance, dance music, industrial rock and electronic experimentation.

At times, that makes it feel less focused.

But it also makes it feel more like Miley.

One could almost wish she had taken the more extreme route and committed completely to the darker electronic and industrial side of the album. There are moments here that suggest she could make a truly wild record if she wanted to. Yet that has never really been how Miley operates. Even at her most experimental, she has always kept one foot in accessibility.

That compromise is both the album's limitation and part of its appeal.

There is a noticeable maturity to the writing. The themes of love and stability are not presented as an attempt to convince us that Miley has suddenly become a different person. Instead, they feel like the natural consequence of everything that came before. The chaos has not disappeared; it has simply stopped being the entire story.

That distinction matters.

Miley has spent two decades being watched, interpreted, criticised and reinvented by everybody except herself. At this stage, perhaps the most radical thing she can do is make a record that does not need to explain her.

Bass Persuades does not ask to be understood immediately. It does not offer a neat thesis about who Miley Cyrus is. It gives us fragments: the romantic, the sexual, the sentimental, the aggressive, the experimental, the nostalgic and the comfortable.

Put together, those fragments make a surprisingly convincing portrait.

This is not the final destination. Miley's career has never been built around final destinations. Every album has tended to open another door, sometimes deliberately and sometimes almost accidentally. Bass Persuades does exactly that again.

It is angular without being alienating, provocative without constantly demanding attention, and romantic without becoming entirely safe. At times it is uneven; at others, it is genuinely thrilling. Most importantly, it feels lived-in.

Ten albums into a career that began with a Disney Channel character and somehow travelled through pop superstardom, rock rebellion, country roots, psychedelic experimentation and avant-garde ambition, Miley Cyrus no longer needs to demonstrate that she can transform.

She has already done that.

What Bass Persuades offers instead is something more interesting: a glimpse at what happens when all those transformations finally start to coexist.

Miley is not choosing between her past selves anymore. She is making them work together.