‘Younger Now’ is Miley Cyrus’ treacly country-pop fantasy
It’s a fine time to be Miley Cyrus.
After Cyrus spent a good part of the past five years as one of celebrity’s most-maligned figures, her new album Younger Now (out Friday), which arrives on a sunbeam of twangy pop, tells the story of a particularly serene period in the singer’s life.
As the album’s back story goes, Cyrus got re-engaged to her longtime boyfriend, deliriously handsome Australian actor Liam Hemsworth, after splitting in 2012. That breakup inspired much of the material on 2013’s hip-hop-channeling Bangerz, with her 2015 followup album, Dead Petz, chronicling the drugged-out experiments that came after.
Now, it’s all rainbows and sunshine, often literally, as Cyrus duets with her godmother, Dolly Parton, on the singsongy Rainbowland and cavorts with Hemsworth in Malibu, the picturesque ode to the property they share in the beachside town. Parton’s presence looms large over the album’s sound, which pairs Cyrus’ husky vocals with the golden guitar tones and vintage swing she inherited from her classic country roots.
Rainbowland even ends with Parton offering to write Cyrus a love song for “some boy you love,” one of the many reminders of just how outside of the real world Younger Now’s bubble of sunshine exists, and how Cyrus’ story has been buoyed by privilege at every step. This is an artist born into music royalty, who freely borrowed from black culture for Bangerz and stepping outside her contract to record the near-unsellable vanity project that was Dead Petz before reclaiming the country music crown that had been waiting for her all along.
Now Cyrus is reborn as a wholesome heroine with her man at her side, with Younger Now presenting a near-lobotomized vision of her adult bliss. The title track kicks off the album with a soulless string of self-improvement mottos (“no one stays the same,” etc), the kind of empty words Cyrus might have mocked on a Bangerz-era track.
When Cyrus’ voice drops into a sassy snarl as she dishes on downer relationships on Week Without You and Bad Mood, it’s clear that drama is behind her, discarding an unlucky partner on Love Someone with the brutal dismissal, “I knew you weren’t the one.”
The album’s most personal moment is
She’s Not Him, a mea culpa that’s ostensibly about one of the women Cyrus was involved with during her breakup with Hemsworth.
In 2017, there’s nothing scandalous about a love song with same-sex pronouns, but between the heavy-handed “she’s not him” chorus and cutting lines like “there’s still no way you could take his place,” the track reads less as boundary-pushing and more as borderline voyeuristic.
The final track on Younger Now wraps up the album’s starryeyed gaze and casually privileged worldview in a neat little bow. Inspired, which Cyrus says she wrote about Hillary Clinton, offers platitudes about the environment before getting to a word salad of a chorus, with such lines as “We are meant for more / With a handle on the door / That opens up the change / I know that sounds so strange.”
Don’t listen too closely and the song sounds simply lovely, with Cyrus’ soaring harmonies getting the full stringquartet treatment. But as Cyrus sings “I hope you feel inspired” on the final track, it’s difficult to believe her.