Miley Cyrus describes new album as "The Wall, but with better wardrobe"

Miley Cyrus is continuing her personal reinvention into a rock star. The singer went psychedelic for 2017’s Miley Cyrus & Her Dead Petz and rocky for 2020’s Plastic Hearts, but 2023 steered her back into more familiar, pop-flavored territory for Endless Summer Vacation. That album earned her a couple Grammy awards (for “Flowers”), but now she’s ready to pivot back to psychedelia and rock and roll. Her upcoming visual album—tentatively titled Something Beautiful—”was inspired by Pink Floyd’s The Wall,” she says in a new interview with Harper’s Bazaar. “My idea was making The Wall, but with a better wardrobe and more glamorous and filled with pop culture.”

She means the “better wardrobe” part pretty literally: Apparently, she’s been bringing clothes into the studio and making fashion vision boards to inspire the actual music. According to Harper’s, a current inspiration is Thierry Mugler’s 1995 couture show. Producer Shawn Everett, who’s worked with Jenny Lewis, War on Drugs, and Alabama Shakes, says Cyrus will “want it to feel like this specific runway show or something. I love when she talks like that. For me, it opens up a whole world.” Cyrus, meanwhile, can show Everett “a painting or a dress, and I’ll tell him to convey those colors or that fabric with sound,” she explains. 

Cyrus is also collaborating with her boyfriend Maxx Morando, who produced “multiple” tracks for the record, as well as director Panos Cosmatos, who is reportedly “heavily involved in the new album,” presumably on the visual side. (Cyrus is a huge fan of Mandy and wanted to play the Nic Cage role in a musical remake of the film, but it didn’t end up happening.) Cosmatos claims her new album is “more experimental than anything she’s ever done, but in a pop way that I love.”

“The visual component of this is driving the sound,” says Cyrus, who describes the record—due out in 2025—as “a concept album that’s an attempt to medicate somewhat of a sick culture through music.” She wants to be “to be a human psychedelic for people,” explaining, “It was important for me that every song has these healing sound properties. The songs, whether they’re about destruction or heartbreak or death, they’re presented in a way that is beautiful, because the nastiest times of our life do have a point of beauty. They are the shadow, they are the charcoal, they are the shading. You can’t have a painting without highlights and contrast.”