‘Bass Persuades’ review: Miley Cyrus loses the argument

Miley Cyrus searches for surrender on Bass Persuades, an uneven album whose boldest ideas deserve stranger, riskier production.

Miley Cyrus opens Bass Persuades by surveying modern life and deciding everybody needs to get off their phones and dance. The joke, or maybe the problem, arrives roughly four minutes later, when the album begins wandering away from the dance floor itself. The title track barrels forward on rubbery synth bass and nightclub percussion while Cyrus plays an evangelist for physical experience, scanning a world of disappearing pastures, fentanyl-laced drugs, MTV nostalgia, fashion, screens, and ambient chaos.

Her solution comes packaged in the hook: “The bass persuades.” Music can bypass the exhausted brain and go straight for the body. Yet Bass Persuades quickly expands that idea beyond music. Across these nine originals and one closing remix, persuasion comes from sex, marriage, gravity, memory, mortality, and eventually domestic devotion.

Cyrus uses the record to ask what could make a person surrender control, then discovers an answer much quieter than the throbbing album title suggests. This lyrical approach certainly gives Bass Persuades an appealing shape. But its musical approach frequently leaves the blueprints scattered across the floor.

Shotgun religion.

“Different Religion,” featuring Model/Actriz, demonstrates how thrilling Cyrus sounds when form and psychology lock together. Clanging industrial textures and predatory low-end surround her as she replaces Christianity with an erotic deity who drives fast, wears leather, and offers salvation through the body. Cyrus’s famous rasp becomes part of the arrangement’s abrasion, scraping against the production rather than floating majestically above it. The track makes desire sound dangerous enough to deserve religious vocabulary, and its repeated invocations of sin, innocence, Genesis, and rebirth establish ideas that keep resurfacing.

Then “Let’s Get Married” races toward the opposite expression of surrender, trading profane ecstasy for white dresses and forever. Cyrus wants marriage immediately, turning commitment into another impulsive leap. The conceptual connection works beautifully. But the musical transition has considerably less force.

Where “Different Religion” makes every synth stab and vocal distortion feel necessary, “Let’s Get Married” settles into glossy soft-rock warmth that gives Cyrus plenty of room to sing and little friction to sing against. Bass Persuades repeatedly creates this frustration. As its strangest production reveals how naturally Cyrus inhabits danger, then its smoother passages send her magnificent voice cruising along freshly paved roads.

Gravity, bunkers, and other terrible ideas.

The album’s main tension becomes especially pronounced across “Orbit” and “Aftermath,” songs that function almost like an argument and its rebuttal. “Orbit” renders infatuation through gravity. Oceans answer the moon, a marble rolls across the floor. Cyrus reorganizes her entire physical existence around another person. The arrangement obliges with spacious synth-pop that aims for celestial weightlessness, although its prettiness turns the cosmic metaphor strangely earthbound.

Then “Aftermath” tears open the fantasy. Cyrus builds a bunker “in the back of my mind,” fills it with art that never belonged to the couple, and mourns an imagined future with the startling image of remembering a forgotten face. The music develops corresponding instability, balancing intimate vocal phrasing against electronic momentum. Until the obsessive refrain circles around possession and its impossibility.

“You were mine” keeps colliding with “you were never mine,” transforming romantic certainty into compulsive self-correction. Cyrus even announces her exhaustion with poets and profundity, a funny admission on an album currently comparing love to religion, celestial mechanics, and the afterlife. The line works because Bass Persuades has quite an appetite for enormous metaphors. Sometimes a breakup leaves somebody contemplating the entire universe. Sometimes you simply want to know whether they still think about you.

Something to believe in.

“REDLIGHTS” begins rebuilding the romantic certainty that “Aftermath” dismantles. And here the album’s recurring language of surrender gains real emotional weight. Cyrus imagines death approaching and greets it with her face turned toward the light because loving someone has given her “something to believe in.”

The song transforms the title track’s invitation to “surrender to the night” into an acceptance of mortality. While its open-road imagery and swelling soft-rock arrangement lend the sentiment an appropriately expansive horizon. “Neon Signs” shrinks that scale again, though. Tangerines, lotion, bare skin, a poodle-shaped bruise. After gods and stars and eternity, intimacy suddenly consists of noticing somebody’s weird little physical details.

Andrew Wyatt’s spoken intrusions introduce a deliberately queasy note, pushing adoration toward fixation while the music hovers in a neon-lit synth haze. The sequence suggests that Cyrus accepts love more easily whenever she reduces its grand abstractions to bodies. That said, the album’s production only engages with that principle sporadically. Cyrus sounds most alive when a track gives her something tactile to unleash through distorted bass, jagged percussion, a strange vocal interruption. The polished adult-pop arrangements, however, leave far fewer fingerprints.

Falling together.

“Innocent Ways” brings all that physicality back while supplying the album’s most distinctly Miley-ish writing. Cyrus worries about a sister who calls her high and in crisis. Then she admits to her own messy behavior by sending a letter while “wired and in my feelings.” And calling someone three times without an answer. Fame hangs over both of them, too, particularly in the fantasy of escaping the Cyrus name for her mother’s maiden name. Even the recurring Blondie joke—her sister won’t dance to the band anymore but still wears the shirt—captures the affectionate irritation of watching someone you love become a person you can’t entirely recognize.

The song also echoes the title track’s complaint that “the kids don’t wanna dance.” Cyrus keeps encountering people who perform identities they struggle to inhabit, including versions of herself. The song’s chrome hearts, crimson lips, cigarettes, ringing phones, and late-night crises give the production concrete material to chew on. And the result joins “Different Religion” and “Aftermath” among the album’s strongest moments.

Each lets Cyrus’s biography, voice, and sonic environment rub together until they produce heat. Hence those songs make the album’s gentler stretches feel all the more frustrating. Simply because the adventurous version of Bass Persuades sounds so fully formed by comparison.

The bottom line.

“Snow” ultimately reveals what Cyrus has been trying to find throughout the entire record. The album starts with restless people who need bass, dancing, fashion, nightlife, and sensory overload to escape a poisoned, screen-addled world. So in the finale, Cyrus lies bored on a floor in Kyoto with somebody she loves. Then boredom itself melts. A proposal arrives through muddy knees, borrowed body heat, an offered left hand. And the possibility of seeing everything again with the same person.

Shimmering synths gradually build all around her, and the repeated image of two people falling like snow changes the album’s idea of surrender. Instead of Cyrus losing herself in someone else, they give themselves to each other. The album’s resolution gives Bass Persuades more thematic coherence than its stylistic zigzags initially advertise. Yet an album about learning that spectacle can yield to intimacy sometimes confuses musical restraint with musical indistinctness.

After all, Cyrus has already demonstrated how productively she can make pop music weird. And tracks like “Different Religion” offer another tantalizing glimpse of that road. So it’s a shame Bass Persuades keeps pulling onto it before returning to safer terrain. The bass persuades, all right. Cyrus just needed to stop interrupting her own argument.

“Bass Persuades” is available now.

---

Images courtesy of Atlantic Records.