Miley Cyrus has long approached her career as a series of well-timed shifts, toggling between pop personas with a fluency that has kept her relevant across decades. Her latest project, Something Beautiful, a full-length visual album set for release on May 30, continues that pattern of reinvention. This time, Cyrus frames her music through the language of archival fashion and high-concept filmmaking.
The album, her ninth studio effort, is accompanied by a visual film and features 13 original tracks. Its rollout began this week with the release of two songs, “Prelude” and “Something Beautiful,” each accompanied by stylized videos co-directed by Cyrus, Jacob Bixenman, and Brendan Walter. Shot by cinematographer Benoît Debie, whose previous work includes Spring Breakers and Enter the Void, the visuals suggest a cinematic scale not typically associated with pop music marketing. In both tone and execution, the material aligns more with the conventions of art film than traditional music video.
The fashion, too, is doing considerable narrative work. Styled by Bradley Kenneth, Cyrus appears throughout the visuals in a selection of garments sourced primarily from the archives of the late Manfred Thierry Mugler. The album cover, shot by Glen Luchford, features the singer wearing a sheer, crystal-embroidered bodysuit and elaborate headpiece from Mugler’s Spring/Summer 1997 haute couture collection, “Les Insectes.” A representative for Mugler noted that this release marked the largest number of archival looks ever loaned by the fashion house to a single artist.
Additional costumes, both vintage and custom, appear throughout the promotional materials and upcoming film. A black Mugler look with beaded webbing, a striped fur coat from 1997, and a custom Mugler dress designed by Casey Cadwallader all feature prominently. Other fashion houses, including Alexander McQueen and Jean Paul Gaultier, contributed archival or bespoke pieces, underscoring the degree to which fashion operates here as more than surface decoration.
In a 2024 interview with Harper’s Bazaar, Cyrus said she hoped the project would “medicate a sick culture through music,” describing it as a concept album in the lineage of Pink Floyd’s The Wall and the 2018 horror film Mandy. She also pointed to themes of beauty emerging from discomfort or decay. “The nastiest times of our life do have a point of beauty,” she said. “They are the charcoal, the shading.”
Musically, Something Beautiful incorporates spoken word, R&B, and guitar-heavy choruses. “Prelude” opens with ambient textures and poetic narration, while the title track builds from a minimal beat to a forceful, distorted climax. The latter’s video depicts Cyrus removing a voluminous coat to reveal a black cut-out dress as wind machines and stage effects escalate around her.
While artists like Beyoncé and Lady Gaga have previously used the visual album format to expand the scope of their musical work, Cyrus’s approach leans more overtly into fashion history and archival storytelling. The references are clear, and, at times, literal: she wears pieces from runway shows that are now more than 25 years old, many of which have previously appeared in museum exhibitions.
Hair and makeup choices echo the same aesthetic logic. A recent teaser image featured Cyrus with a high, teased ponytail reminiscent of 1990s teen sitcoms, while earlier promotional materials showed sculptural hairstyles and bleached brows. Her hairstylist, Bob Recine, said in a previous interview that Cyrus “understands that fashion is only fashion if it changes.”
Cyrus’s recent artistic output has attracted renewed critical attention, in part due to the commercial success of her 2023 single “Flowers,” which earned her her first Grammy wins. Something Beautiful follows that momentum but moves in a more deliberately experimental direction. It is also, notably, Cyrus’s first full-length release since Endless Summer Vacation and the first where she takes on directing responsibilities for the visual companion piece.
Whether or not the new project meets with commercial success, it reflects a broader shift among major artists toward treating the album not just as a collection of songs, but as a multidimensional experience—equal parts music, image, narrative, and performance. Cyrus, now 32, has consistently used the framework of the album cycle to reset her public identity. This time, she seems less interested in spectacle for its own sake and more focused on building a cohesive aesthetic world, shaped as much by archival fashion and visual direction as by sound.
