Miley Cyrus - She Is Coming

The Guardian 80

(RCA Records)
Once shuttling awkwardly between different personas, Cyrus draws together all sides of her personality with this new EP

Few pop stars ricochet between personas as quickly as Miley Cyrus. Somehow still only 26, the country-hip-hop-Disney-hybrid star seems to have lived nine lives, both as herself and as a revolving door of characters. She began her career with a meta-commentary on pop fame in the 00s tween TV show Hannah Montana, playing a schoolgirl with a secret pop career. In a forthcoming Black Mirror episode, she once again plays a pop star – this time caught in the seemingly darker throes of the music industry, while simultaneously living out her own public metamorphosis. But with the release of her new EP, She Is Coming, Cyrus seems keen to remind her audience of the real identity behind the facade.

It’s a refreshing blast of six breezy, rock and trap-inflected pop songs, a pleasingly nuanced effort from an artist whose recent releases have each felt like they came from a different archetype. There was the “ratchet”, hypersexualised 2013 album Bangerz, a patchy clutch of R&B party jams for which Cyrus was criticised for borrowing heavily from black culture. Then there was the straight-to-Soundcloud, psychedelic stoner opus, Miley Cyrus & Her Dead Petz. And then, in 2017, an apologetic U-turn back to her country roots with Younger Now – an album that saw a long-haired and makeup-free Cyrus abandon the cultural markers of hip-hop she had previously leant on.