Miley Cyrus: Plastic Hearts review – too plastic, but has heart

Six years ago, Miley Cyrus’s Bangerz tour arrived in London. It was as ludicrous and ludicrously entertaining a stadium pop show as anyone is ever likely to stage, featuring Cyrus dancing on stage with a pantomime horse, singing a ballad while being chased by a giant fluorescent orange puppet bird and appearing alongside a 30ft statue of her recently-deceased dog Floyd, which shot lasers out of its eyes. Just when you were wondering what she could possibly do next, she asked the audience if they liked Bob Dylan. The ensuing tumbleweed silence suggested they didn’t, but she sang You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go anyway. On other occasions, she favoured the crowd with the Smiths’ There Is a Light That Never Goes Out, Irma Thomas’s 1963 New Orleans soul classic Ruler of My Heart and Led Zeppelin’s Babe I’m Gonna Leave You.

Miley Cyrus: Plastic Hearts album cover. Photograph: AP

This wasn’t a pop star dutifully padding out her set with a few well-known singalongs: it was audience-challenging evidence of the intriguingly catholic taste that Cyrus’s subsequent career has tried to accommodate. She followed Bangerz with Miley Cyrus & Her Dead Petz, which featured her playing Tibetan bowls and collaborating with the Flaming Lips, whose sound it frequently recalled. She made a coolly-received country album followed by a synth-heavy EP that featured guest appearances from Ghostface Killah, Rae Sremmurd’s Swae Lee and RuPaul. Her latest arrives packaged like an 80s new wave album: neon pink on black, Mick Rock photo of a peroxide-mulleted Cyrus wearing leather gloves and a T-shirt that reads “CENSORED”. It was trailed by a fantastic single, Midnight Sky, that interpolated Stevie Nicks’s 1981 hit Edge of Seventeen (the Fleetwood Mac vocalist later appeared on a mashup remix), and a succession of cover versions including an acoustic take on Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here and Blondie’s Heart of Glass recorded with a live band. These were rapturously received, and it’s pretty obvious why. To use the kind of term Cyrus might have deployed during the Bangerz tour, she sang the shit out of them all, her rasping voice – a very different-sounding instrument to that of any other big mainstream pop vocalist – adding a raw power even to a version of the Cranberries’ terminally windy and overbearing Zombie.

The guest list highlights the tricky path that Plastic Heart picks through Cyrus’s tastes: punky 80s stars Billy Idol and Joan Jett alongside Dua Lipa. It pitches ballads that display varying degrees of Nashville traditionalism – from the acoustic High to the concluding Golden G-String, which comes decorated with lovely Abba-esque synths – against mainstream 2020 pop, electronic leftovers from the scrapped album She Is Miley Cyrus and tracks that lean into Cyrus’s penchant for rock. The latter are by some distance the least successful things here, largely because they offer a mainstream 2020 pop producer’s idea of what rock music should sound like. Despite the distortion, there’s something antiseptic about the guitars that back her picking over her recent divorce on WTF Do I Know, while the obligatory sheen of Auto-Tune succeeds in neutering Cyrus’s voice, making her full-throated roar oddly reedy. With the exception of Bad Karma, produced by Mark Ronson and lent a live feel through its thumping drums, it sounds like rock music put through an Instagram filter. It’s disappointing once you’ve heard what Cyrus can do when she lets rip live: if you haven’t, Heart of Glass and Zombie are appended to the deluxe edition.

Miley Cyrus: Prisoner ft Dua Lipa – video

The presence of Blondie’s pop classic casts some of the album’s songwriting in a pretty unforgiving light, though there is some good material. Angels Like You is a precision-tooled stadium ballad, complete with nailed-on chorus. The 80s affectations of Night Crawling are well done, elevated further by Billy Idol in full-on growling White Wedding mode (“come awhn!”). Never Be Me and Gimme What I Want are superior examples of floaty synth pop. But the Lipa collaboration Prisoner is far less interesting than its blood-spattered, spider-eating, John Waters-quoting video: its sound isn’t a million miles from Lipa’s own Future Nostalgia, but the song itself isn’t anything like as strong as that album’s hits. You don’t doubt Cyrus’s emotional connection to the angsty lyrics of Hate Me, nor the title track, but her voice is underserved by the boilerplate melodies and musical settings.

Listening to Plastic Heart, it’s hard not to suspect a sense of compromise: attempting to corral Cyrus’s diverse interests into something with obvious commercial appeal to avoid the muted sales of 2017’s Younger Now, which failed to convince pop fans or lure in the traditional country crowd. It isn’t a bad album but it’s far less interesting and more straightforward than the artist who made it.

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