Miley Cyrus - Bass Persuades (The Single)
Miley Cyrus is begging you to find a little bit of fun in yourself and hit the dancefloor. Would you dare?
As she enters her new era with a move to Atlantic Records and a new parent label, Warner, Miley is once again presenting a new side of herself. I’ve been listening to Miley for 16 of my 28 years, and I probably would have a hard time recognizing her at the beginning of this track if you played this song to me blindly. Because with this lead single, she steps into Madonna and Lady Gaga territory.
And if she has already flirted with Madonna’s pop multiple times, the addition of that dark pop that Lady Gaga has cemented for herself over the last 20 years is something we’re hearing from Miley for the first time. If we have to compare this to something from Miley’s career, it feels like a very distant and grown-up relative of Can’t Be Tamed, with those clubby, delicious touches that were present on Something Beautiful.
This is a pretty delicious, energetic, short, close-to-the-point synth-pop composition, and vibe-wise — especially with the music video — it even gives off some Madonna-in-the-2010s energy. The song has quite distinct parts, and the ones I probably want to highlight as the most successful are the pre-choruses and, of course, the choruses.
I’m not entirely sure about that conversational first verse, because it’s not exactly saying much and catching you off guard. But when, in the second verse, she starts literally preaching to Gen Z, with a lot of genuinely interesting references, sending them to at least go to the cinema and stick their head out of the window to see the world around them, even self-referencing herself with the “can’t stop, won’t stop” line, she enters a very interesting and attractive territory. She becomes someone who has already lived through so many musical eras and reincarnations of herself, someone who has absorbed so much different music, processed it through herself and shown it in her work so many times that it would be stupid not to listen to what she has to say.
When it comes to the people involved in the sound of the track — the gang is here: Kid Harpoon, Michael Pollack and Maxx Morando. And there are zero questions here. The musical accompaniment is a dirtier beat than what we heard on Something Beautiful and its dance tracks, and it sounds delicious, juicy, modern, but at the same time nostalgic enough to still fit into what audiences are asking for in contemporary music today.
And who knows, maybe Miley will become that voice that connects the generations and shows them that you can have fun offline, too.
8.0/10
