Miley Cyrus - Miley Cyrus And Her Dead Petz

Ten years ago, dressed in something abstract and surrounded by drag queens, Miley Cyrus shouted at the end of the MTV VMAs: “My new album, Miley Cyrus And Her Dead Petz, is online for free right now.” Looking back, those might be the most important words of her career — the true before-and-after moment. Dead Petz is not often remembered as a cult classic in the strict sense, but its shadow is long: its influence quietly reverberated through pop music, foreshadowing many things that now feel normal, while others still seem impossible even today.

On August 30, 2015, Miley released Miley Cyrus & Her Dead Petz on SoundCloud — a record overflowing with grief, psychedelic abandon, sprawling druggy experiments, and a raw soulfulness that remains almost absent from the rest of her catalog, and from the catalogs of her pop contemporaries.

Dropped without warning, on a random Sunday night, the album landed like a bomb. Here was an artist fresh off Bangerz — one of the loudest and most commercially successful pop eras of the 2010s. She had just managed, however controversially, to convince the public to accept her new persona. And yet Miley was already bored of it. By then she had shed and reinvented herself ten times over, and was ready to discard everything — her momentum, her audience’s expectations, even her label’s demands — in pursuit of her own vision. Crucially, Cyrus made the record hand in hand with the Flaming Lips — veterans of psychedelic excess who had long thrived outside the rules of mainstream pop. Their presence pushed the project even further from the center, framing Dead Petz less as a calculated stunt and more as a genuine leap into outsider art.

Dead Petz stands as a rare example of a “non-era” album, released entirely outside the promotional cycle. It was a direct confrontation with RCA, a rejection of the idea that every pop star’s release must usher in a new, marketable era. This type of rupture had precedent: Beyoncé’s surprise self-titled album in 2013 had redefined release strategies for megastars. But Beyoncé’s record came with the machinery of a major label behind it. Miley went further — a young pop star, putting out a sprawling DIY album, for free, on SoundCloud. Prince did it, Frank Ocean did it — and then Miley Cyrus, the most unlikely of them all, did it too.

A few years later Ariana Grande would casually drop thank u, next, Rex Orange County would upload his debut Bcos U Will Never B Free straight to Bandcamp, and Taylor Swift would announce Folklore less than 24 hours before release. But in 2015, none of this was normal. For a mainstream pop idol it was closer to the radicalism of M.I.A.’s Arular and her messy release or even the chaotic sprawl of Captain Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica — especially in terms of musical content — records initially met or released with confusion, only to be reevaluated years later as pioneering works.

What made Dead Petz even more audacious is that Miley was not in critics’ good graces at the time. This wasn’t Radiohead, granted the freedom to reinvent themselves with Kid A. This was a singer dismissed by many as tabloid fodder, willingly placing herself in the line of fire with 23 tracks of messy, experimental, often abrasive psychedelic pop. And that courage is something Cyrus never really got her flowers for. Because let me be clear — if this album had been released by someone far less famous, far less “poppy” than Cyrus, it would have been hailed instantly as a critic’s darling. An underground artist dropping a scrappy, free SoundCloud opus — equal parts Flaming Lips freak-out and lo-fi diary confessional — would have been canonized on the spot.

But while its release strategy was radical, what truly cemented Dead Petz as a singular artifact was its sound. Dead Petz, beyond its psychedelic avant-garde edge, can also be seen as an early, accidental blueprint for what would later be called bedroom-pop — years before girl in red, Clairo, or even early Billie Eilish made lo-fi intimacy a global sound. At the same time, it’s “acid-pop” in the most literal sense: a strange resurrection of the fried psychedelia of the late ’60s and ’70s, refracted through Miley’s restless, overexposed millennial lens.

And all of this sprawling chaos finds its home in a 90-minute odyssey that, in 2015, felt almost impossible to categorize. Today, artists are free to drop mixtapes, playlists, and one-off projects with little fanfare — but back then, the very act of releasing a 23-track DIY experiment was a radical rejection of how pop cycles were supposed to work. Dead Petz was “unprofessional,” unpolished, and unfiltered, a trip into Miley’s own immediacy — her pain, her joy, her delirium. If it had been released today, in the TikTok era, its rawness and lack of polish would likely be celebrated as authenticity, rather than condemned as chaos.

The record offers… a lot. It’s neither the misunderstood masterpiece some revisionists want to claim, nor the total disaster critics painted it as at the time. There are throwaway oddities (“Tangerine”, “I Forgive Yiew”, “Milky Milky Milk”), but for every indulgence, there’s a song of surprising clarity: sensitive “Karen Don’t Be Sad”, epic “1 Sun”, or emotional “Twinkle Song” — the latter easily standing as one of the most moving ballads of Cyrus’s career.

This is a childlike, chaotic, structurally fragile album — as if it were made by someone who had let go of all guardrails, for better and worse. And that’s precisely where its power lies: in opening invisible psychic doors that polished studio pop would never allow. It’s an album of sexual fantasies, dissatisfaction, drifting thoughts, bold dreams, stoned philosophizing about peace and meaning, tears buried in a pillow, drunken screams at 3 a.m. It’s a portrait of an artist momentarily abandoning control, and in doing so, producing something radically human.

Few today would name Miley Cyrus & Her Dead Petz as a direct influence, but its shadow lingers everywhere: in the normalization of surprise releases, in the blurred lines between mixtape and album, in the rise of lo-fi indie pop aesthetics. In her own career, Dead Petz became the rupture that later allowed her to swing as wildly as from Younger Now to Plastic Hearts and back. As uneven as it is unforgettable, Dead Petz earns its place in the conversation — not for perfection, but for the courage to exist at all. Whether consciously or not, the blood spilled on Dead Petz seeped underground, nourishing currents of experimentation that would later surface across the pop landscape. It was more than music, more than provocation. It was a torn-open soul, bleeding freely into the culture.

8.0/10