Bass Persuades

“There’s a song on the record called ‘Snow’ and the outro is me saying over and over again as a mantra, ‘It doesn’t get better,’” the artist formerly known as Miley Cyrus tells Apple Music. “This right here, this life that I’m in, this moment, it is such bliss. It isn’t just that I wake up and I’m happy, it is the boundaries that I set.” The day before the announcement of her 10th studio album, Miley Cyrus changed her name, dropping “Cyrus” on all socials to go mononymous, as icons often do (think Cher, Madonna, Beyoncé). With two decades of stardom already in the rearview, the name change heralded a new era for the 33-year-old musician whose career has been defined by fearless experimentation, from 2013’s rebellious Bangerz to 2015’s psych-rock curveball Miley Cyrus & Her Dead Petz to the world-conquering disco empowerment of 2023’s “Flowers”. Fittingly, as she shared in a heartfelt tribute to her late godmother Dolly Parton, one of their final conversations “was about music and metamorphosis”. If her 2007 debut album extended the invitation to Meet Miley Cyrus, Bass Persuades arrives with a new offer—meet Miley. And it appears that Miley has read the recent studies claiming that young people don’t party anymore. The antidote to this dilemma? A gritty album of hedonistic dance-pop, on which she casts her smoky voice in Blondie-esque directions when she isn’t belting out anthemic ’80s-coded love songs. (Amid her whirlwind of a past year, which included a deluxe version of 2025’s Something Beautiful and a live Hannah Montana 20th anniversary special, she got engaged to musician Maxx Morando, a name that appears often in Bass Persuades’ credits.) “The point,” she says, “was to have community through music again.” A love story hidden inside a raucous dance party, Bass Persuades finds Miley ready to surrender—to true love, to passion, to the thrill of the night. “Go analogue!” she urges on the New Wave-tinged title track, “Bass Persuades”, pining for the era when peo