She's just being "Miley" now. Miley Cyrus, one of her generation's defining pop stars, has a new album on the way, and she has dropped the "Cyrus" from her name. This feels like an implicit rebuke of her father, the troubled country star Billy Ray Cyrus, but she hasn't come out any said anything about that yet. She also hasn't said much about her new LP. It's called Bass Persuades, and it's coming out in just a couple of weeks.
Miley recently celebrated the 20th anniversary of Hannah Montana, the Disney show that made her famous as a kid, and mourned the loss of her godmother Dolly Parton. It's been a little more than a year since the release of her last album Something Beautiful. That record was not a commercial success, but it was a bold artistic leap that found her working with collaborators like Foxygen's Jonathan Rado, the War On Drugs' Adam Granduciel, and Alvvays' Molly Rankin and Alec O'Hanley.
According to a press release, the photographer Mert Alas, who took the Bass Persuades cover photo you see above, "exclusively created the visual world surrounding the album." Cyrus recently guest-edited a special issue of Wonderland Magazine, and it was styled by another of Miley's Bass Persuades collaborators, Chief Creative Officer Alastair McKimm. That doesn't tell us much about how the record might sell, but we're not supposed to know that yet.
Bass Persuades is out 9/18 on Atlantic. Pre-order it here. After its release, Miley will return to the stage with two Hollywood Bowl shows, set to go down 10/16 and 10/18. Model/Actriz, whose frontman Cole Haden appeared on Something Beautiful, will open both nights. You can sign up for pre-sales here.
