Miley Cyrus has never been one to let convention define her sound.Across two decades in pop, she has moved restlessly between glossy pop, psychedelia, country, glam rock and synth-heavy nostalgia, treating genre less as a fixed identity than something to bend around the grain of her unmistakable voice. On her tenth studio album, Bass Persuades, the Tennessee-born singer enters another sonic chapter. This time, she does so simply as Miley.
Spanning 10 tracks and just under 40 minutes, Bass Persuades is a compact dance-pop record built around a deceptively simple proposition: what happened to dancing? On the title track, Miley repeatedly laments that “the kids don’t wanna dance”, setting the album’s mission into motion. If modern life has made us reluctant to surrender ourselves to the dancefloor, Miley would quite like to change our minds.
Produced by Miley alongside Kid Harpoon, Michael Pollack and Maxx Morando, “Bass Persuades” opens the record with a rush of bass, synths and percussion. Its restless electronic production has the physicality of a club record, while Miley’s famously raspy vocal cuts through the machinery rather than disappearing beneath it. The result establishes the album’s central tension: music as something to think about, certainly, but more importantly, something to feel in the body.
That impulse becomes stranger and more abrasive on “Different Religion”, featuring Brooklyn rock band Model/Actriz. Drawing from electroclash and industrial textures, the track pushes Miley into one of the record’s more unconventional corners. Here, faith becomes less about orthodoxy than personal mythology, as she sings of having her own god, one who happens to drive a fast car. Against the track’s jagged electronic pulse, spirituality and hedonism begin to occupy the same dancefloor.
By the third track, however, the album reveals the romance hiding beneath its nightlife.
“Let’s Get Married” softens the edges with an unmistakably nostalgic glow. Its bass-driven production and ’80s-inflected pop sensibility frame Miley at her most lovestruck. “What did I do to deserve you?” she asks, trading bravado for gratitude. For an artist whose catalogue has so often documented desire, heartbreak, independence and reinvention, there is something quietly striking about hearing her simply bask in the certainty of being loved.
Then comes “Orbit”, one of Bass Persuades’ brightest moments precisely because it knows when to pull back.
Built around a sombre piano progression, the song slows the album’s pulse and gives Miley’s voice room to breathe. “I’m drawn to you, I belong to you,” she sings, her weathered vocal carrying the weight of a declaration that might have sounded saccharine in less capable hands. Here, love is rendered as gravity. After an opening stretch preoccupied with movement, “Orbit” finds its power in stillness, momentarily replacing the crowded dancefloor with something far more intimate.
The beat soon returns on “Aftermath”, snapping the album back into motion with a galloping electronic pulse and a restless sense of release. A few tracks later, “Innocent Ways” taps into a similar instinct. Both songs are designed to make remaining seated feel increasingly unreasonable. Across the record, Miley repeatedly treats the dancefloor as both setting and metaphor: a place for abandon, connection and escape, but also somewhere emotion can be sweated out rather than endlessly intellectualised.
That is ultimately where Bass Persuades finds its identity. For all its basslines, synths and late-night energy, this is not merely a record about going out. Running beneath the production is a surprisingly tender love story. Romance repeatedly interrupts the party, whether through the devotion of “Let’s Get Married”, the gravitational pull of “Orbit” or the album’s broader preoccupation with surrendering to whatever makes life feel immediate.
By the time Bass Persuades circles back to its title track for the closing “Bass Persuades Remixx”, the record ends much as it began: in motion. The remix pushes the song further towards the club, closing the album not with a dramatic revelation, but with one final invitation to move.
As a body of work, Bass Persuades is compelling and tightly constructed, another demonstration of Miley’s ability to move between genres without losing the voice at the centre of them. The newly adopted mononym could easily have arrived alongside some elaborate reinvention, another Miley persona to add to an already crowded history of transformations. Instead, the record feels less interested in introducing somebody new than revealing another dimension of the artist who has been there all along.
Perhaps that is why Bass Persuades does not need to be groundbreaking to make its case. Its influences are audible, its retro impulses familiar, and it does not attempt to redraw the boundaries of dance-pop. What it does offer is a confident addition to a discography built on movement, contradiction and experimentation. Twenty years into a career spent changing costumes, genres and expectations, Miley sounds increasingly uninterested in proving that she can become somebody else. On Bass Persuades, she simply turns up the volume, follows the bass and asks us to dance with her.
Stream Bass Persuades by Miley.
