For Miley Cyrus, stylistic pivots are nothing new. Her career has covered radio-friendly rock, hip-hop-infused R&B, country and grown-up pop, but it seems that she might be about to make her most ambitious musical move yet.
In a new interview with Harper’s Bazaar, Cyrus says that her new album, which is set to be called Something Beautiful, takes inspiration from an unlikely source: Pink Floyd’s The Wall.
Cyrus says that she watched the surreal 1982 film - named after Pink Floyd’s 1979 album, The Wall - when she was a teenager, alongside her brother and one of her friends. And it seems to have left a lasting impression.
“I have this heart-first attachment to it,” Cyrus says. “My idea was making The Wall, but with a better wardrobe and more glamorous and filled with pop culture.”
Explaining further, she says that the mood of her new record - which is also a visual project, apparently - is “hypnotising and glamorous,” adding that “It’s a concept album that’s an attempt to medicate somewhat of a sick culture through music.”
One of the collaborators on the new record is director Pano Cosmatos, who Cyrus originally approached because she had conceived Something Beautiful as a musical remake of Cosmatos’ 2018 horror film, Mandy, which starred Nicholas Cage. That idea came to nothing, but Cosmatos still came on board, and says that the new album is “more experimental than anything she’s ever done, but in a pop way that I love.”
Conceived by Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters, The Wall is a concept album that tells the story of Pink, a disillusioned rock star, who constructs a ‘wall’ of social isolation. Miley Cyrus’s Something Beautiful will be released in 2025.
Elsewhere in the interview, Cyrus says that her godmother, who happens to be Dolly Parton, was sceptical about her singing her 2023 single, Used To Be Young. “She goes, ‘I don’t know if I like that new Used to Be Young song because it’s not fair that you’re singing about not being young when you’re young and beautiful,” says Cyrus of Parton’s reaction. “‘And here I am - I’m like 80 - and I’m like, That should have been my song!’”
