Bass Persuades — Miley Cyrus Atlantic Records | 18 September 2026 ⭐⭐ (2/10)
There’s a version of this album that works. You can almost hear it — somewhere beneath the murk of Bass Persuades, there’s a record about grief and devotion and the particular vertigo of deciding, finally, to let someone in. Miley Cyrus has earned the right to make something messy and personal and strange. She’s done it before, brilliantly. Miley Cyrus & Her Dead Petz was a genuinely deranged psych-rock fever dream that nobody asked for and everyone should hear at least once. Bangerz was loud and bratty and completely itself. Even “Flowers” — a song that was everywhere for six months and still didn’t outstay its welcome — had a spine to it. Bass Persuades has none of that. What it has, instead, is the air of a very expensive creative retreat that produced very little of value.
The conceit, apparently, is that this is a love story hidden inside a dance party. Miley — she’s dropped the Cyrus, at least for now, announced with the kind of Los Angeles Times wrap-around cover that signals moment before a single note has been played — has described the album as a reflection of her relationship with fiancé Maxx Morando, while simultaneously honouring the influence of her late godmother, Dolly Parton. That dual ambition is not inherently a problem. The problem is that neither thread is pulled with any conviction. The grief is decorative. The love story is vague to the point of abstraction. And the dance party, frankly, doesn’t get going.
The title track opens proceedings with a low, grinding bass line and a vocal performance that suggests Miley knows exactly what she’s doing — smoky, controlled, a little menacing. It promises something. It does not deliver something. The groove stalls almost immediately, the production (largely assembled with Morando) opting for a studied coolness that reads, after nine tracks, less like restraint and more like underwriting. Blondie comparisons have been floated by the label, presumably because there’s a bass guitar present and Miley has blonde hair. Blondie — well, Robyn is probably the more instructive reference point for this strain of danceable melancholy — understood that cool and cold are not the same thing. Bass Persuades is cold.
“Let’s get married in the neon signs / Let’s get lost in the overnight”
“Let’s Get Married” is, on paper, the album’s emotional centrepiece — the big declaration, the moment where the raucous dance party supposedly reveals its tender interior. And it’s not without something. The Ennio Morricone-adjacent strings that drift in during the bridge are genuinely lovely, a brief glimpse of the album this could have been. But the lyric — let’s get married in the neon signs — lands with less weight than it needs to. It’s the kind of line that sounds profound when you’re writing it at two in the morning and rather less profound by daylight. “Orbit” has a similar problem: a ballad so tastefully assembled that it disappears from memory while you’re still listening to it.
“REDLIGHTS” is the one moment where things cohere. The production here has actual tension to it — a propulsive, slightly paranoid energy that suits Miley’s voice far better than the mid-tempo plod she’s working with elsewhere. Watch the lyric video here and you’ll see what the album might have looked like had it committed to this particular direction. It’s not enough to redeem the surrounding tracks, but it’s enough to confirm that the talent hasn’t gone anywhere. It’s just been pointed in the wrong direction.
“Neon Signs,” featuring Andrew Wyatt of Miike Snow, is where the Dolly tribute angle should presumably do some legible work, but instead arrives as the album’s most anonymous moment — adult contemporary pop so smooth it barely registers as music. “Innocent Ways” and “Snow” form a closing pair that manage to be both overwrought and undercooked simultaneously, which is an achievement of sorts. The Model/Actriz remix of the title track that closes the tracklist is, genuinely, an improvement on the original — darker, stranger, less eager to please. It makes you wish they’d just made that album.
The context around Bass Persuades is genuinely poignant. Losing Dolly Parton, getting engaged, rebranding for what feels like the tenth time — there’s real material here. Olivia Rodrigo took romantic chaos and turned it into one of the most viscerally specific pop records in years. Lorde has made a career of transmuting her own emotional turbulence into something that feels universal precisely because it’s so particular. Miley Cyrus is capable of that. She just hasn’t done it here.
What we’re left with is an album that mistakes distance for sophistication, that confuses a low BPM with emotional depth, and that squanders a genuinely compelling premise — a grief record disguised as a club night — on production choices so careful they’ve had all the life ironed out of them. The dropped surname feels like the boldest decision on the entire project. Miley wanted to start fresh; instead, she’s made her most forgettable record yet, and that, given the circumstances surrounding it, is the most disappointing thing of all.