Bass Persuades by Miley Cyrus // Album Review
Bass Persuades seemingly promised a rebirth for Miley as a massive, bass‑driven dance record, but somehow that never fully materializes within the project itself. The rollout was unusually quick, with the lead single announced, released, and then the full album arriving within about two weeks. Unfortunately, the music feels just as rushed as the promotion did, most disappointingly offering not much bass to be persuaded in a largely forgettable, lackluster chapter of her discography.
Boring is worse than bad, and ultimately that's exactly what much of the criticism for this album boils down to. There are glimpses of something interesting conceptually, with flashes of the artist who has been known to push boundaries and reinvent herself with intention time and time again, but the highlights of this album are buried under songs that never rise to the level of persona Miley is capable of.
Bass Persuades somewhat picks up where Endless Summer Vacation and Something Beautiful left off. At its best, it sounds like a blend of the two with cool moments scattered throughout, but lacks the big commercial pop moment of "Flowers" and the grand cinematic landscapes that defined Something Beautiful. She's clearly in an era of her life filled with confidence and love, but artistically, this feels like a regressive step back from the leaps she took across her most recent work.
Most of the album is made up of love songs written for her partner, Maxx Morando, who's credited as a songwriter and producer on nearly every track. He played a major creative role in some of the highlights of Endless Summer Vacation and Something Beautiful, but that spark often does not really carry through here beyond the first few tracks. Miley has access to some of the best pop producers - and she did work with many of them here - but even then it still just feels like leftovers from her last two projects. Miley has always had such a strong visual identity and such a clear sense of aesthetic direction, so it's strange that the music doesn't match the ambition of the branding.
By dropping her last name, she steps into the single‑name lineage of artists like Madonna and Cher - a prestigious tier of pop‑culture iconography she absolutely has the legacy to stand beside. But the release of this album is overwhelmingly underwhelming, despite the full‑speed‑ahead rollout.
The lead title single does the best job at capturing the overall ethos that Miley was looking to pursue with this project. "Bass Persuades" channels the very specific MTV-era of pop music, drawing clear inspiration from artists like Madonna, Blondie and Michael Jackson. Debbie Harry's influence in particular is one of the most prominent of all, with references that come across may times throughout this album in different ways. The bridge of this song in particular carries echoes of Blondie's "Rapture" in both attitude and delivery.
Miley wrote the song alongside Kid Harpoon, a longtime collaborator whose previous work with her includes Endless Summer Vacation and the massive hit "Flowers". Their work together often pushes Miley toward some of her most polished and interesting creative choices, with "Bass Persuades" being one of the strongest examples of that on this record. The song's repeated mantra "the kids don't wanna dance" serves as the mission statement for this song, and the rest of the album, reflecting Miley's desire to inspire a new generation of dance music with Bass Persuades. That line feels very similar to the chorus of "Dance No More" by Harry Styles, which was released earlier this year and also produced by Kid Harpoon.
"Different Religion" introduces one of the album's most seductive and adventurous sonic landscapes. It seemed like the rest of the album would have likely continued in this direction of glam, art-pop club bangers - much in the same way standout songs like "Reborn" and "Walk of Fame" do for Something Beautiful - but for better or worse, "Different Religion" seems to stand largely on its own for Bass Persuades.
She collaborated with artist Model/Actriz for the second verse, which adds a unique sense of darkness and intensity to the track, one that sounds reminiscent of "Hush" by The Marías. "I've got my own god, he drives a fast car, I've got my own god, he makes some loud noise," she sings in the opening verse. "I've got my own god, my god's a hot boy".
"Let's Get Married" is a strong showcase of how far Miley has come in a personal sense, with really beautiful lyricism that heightens the atmosphere the album is building in the opening stretch. The repeated sentiment of "What did I do to deserve you" is really sweet and feels like a continuation of a song like "Rose Colored Lenses", with the progression of that same story.
"Orbit" is also a beautiful song lyrically that connects to many of the same themes as "Let's Get Married", with more intense production and interesting visual celestial lyricism that further expands the recurring themes of love and devotion. Other than these two songs, most of the rest of the album falls flat in really pulling through on any meaningful impact, and even many of the stronger moments feel effective mostly because they are reminiscent of better songs from earlier albums.
There are some genuinely bad moments on the album as well. On "Aftermath", Miley sings as if it were a ballad, but the production sounds like a bad club remix, with the instrumental not matching the tone of her voice at all. There are also some surprisingly rough mixing choices given the caliber of producers she worked with.
The worst example of all is "Neon Signs" featuring Andrew Wyatt, who is a collaborator Miley has worked with many times before, but this time he appears as a featured vocalist. Despite having such a strong track record as a producer, this may be one of the weakest songs either of them have ever released. The production and mixing are so cluttered that the lyrics and vocals become completely muddled, and Andrew Wyatt's vocal performance never quite comes together. Given how consistently great his production work has been in the past, the way this song turned out is surprisingly far below expectations.
"Innocent Ways", in contrast, is by far the strongest song on the album and one of the only moments that actually captures the full potential of Miley's songwriting and the legacy she has built for herself over the past two decades. It presents an interesting narrative of watching her younger sister go through the growing pains and rebellion of early adulthood, experiences that Miley herself has already lived through and come out on the other side of, but ultimately has to let her sister learn those lessons for herself.
"Sisters, I want better for my sister, she calls me only when it's late night, and she's high, her mind is spinning eight nights in a row, she's been in a crisis," Miley sings in the opening verse. "She looks just like me when she cries, now that we're both older, I tried to save all of her innocent ways".
The song evokes so much perspective from the time that has passed, and its themes feel central to this era of Miley's life and career. The familial exploration is something she hasn't really delved into in this very specific way before, which makes the song stand out even more amongst the rest of the album that so often struggles to say anything particularly meaningful like this.
"Grace comes with age, but don't tell her," Miley sings in the chorus. "Fall out from the fame, claim my mother's maiden name, lips in crimson shades, how I love her". In some ways, "Innocent Ways" feels like a reflection on the person Miley was during the controversial Can't Be Tamed and Bangerz eras, looking back at those years with a perspective that could only come from growing older.
"Won't dance to Blondie anymore, she's got them on her shirt, she knows I liked them first" is such a subtle and funny older sister dig toward the end of the song, but it also reinforces the central theme of the track as well. It would also be incredible if her sister Noah collaborated with her on a remix of the song someday. The subject matter already feels so personal, and hearing the story from both perspectives could add another layer to this deeply layered moment of the album.
"Snow" is the closing track to the album, which is such a boring, nothingness ending to Bass Persuades. Again, it suffers from the same looming issue mentioned earlier, which is that boring is truly worse than bad. While there are some truly bad moments, so much of this album is just boring and not memorable in the slightest. There is nothing really notable happening in terms of production, performance, or lyricism, which leaves little to really grasp onto with this work.
Perhaps this album would have landed better with stronger transitions, or really any transitions at all. Something Beautiful had a lot of cool blended moments that made it feel like a fully realized world from beginning to end. This feels a little more rushed, and for what?
The last album was so much more sonically cohesive and so much more memorable, so what's the point of rushing out a follow-up so soon after if it is completely regressive in so many ways? Something Beautiful was among her greatest work yet, with so much grandiosity in both the production and the world it built within its songs. It wasn't devoid of any flaws, but it was such a strong body of work that really captured Miley as the generational talent she truly is.
She is one of many artists in a growing string of pop stars who are oversaturating their own market with these rushed, low-stakes releases that don't provide any meaningful artistic progression from what they have spent years, and in her case decades, building. Instead, it starts to feel like music is being released simply for the sake of releasing it, whether that be for sales, attention, streaming numbers, or just because there is nobody left to tell them not to. It ultimately muddles the rest of the good stuff and creates a sense of fatigue for the listener.
It isn't really that much of a dance album, so the non-existent bass isn't persuading anyone here. It also doesn't make any cohesive artistic statement either; not that every album needs to do that, but Bass Persuades often feels like it isn't giving much of anything at all. It's not even particularly effective as mindless club music because the production isn't consistently strong enough to carry it there, either. For the opening title track to be built around the complaint that "the kids don't wanna dance", the irony is that this rarely gives anyone much reason to. But we do want to dance! So make something worth dancing to!
Thanks for reading! I have written about Miley Cyrus' music many times over the years, all of which are linked here and below - with more coming soon, always! ★
Photo Credit: Miley Cyrus, Atlantic Records
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